


Taken 4: My Keith has been Taken

by StormysHealthyCopingMechanisms



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: I Admit It, I don't know what I'm doing, Keith gets taken and Lance gets pissed, M/M, antagonistic space bros, hurt keith, hurt/comfort gives me feels, made all the things up, never heard of it, nobody messes with the precious, protective/vengeance Lance, science what is this, this was a one-night headcanon because
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-04
Updated: 2017-08-09
Packaged: 2018-11-23 08:09:03
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 33,124
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11398542
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StormysHealthyCopingMechanisms/pseuds/StormysHealthyCopingMechanisms
Summary: I don't know who you are. I don't know what you want. If you are looking for ransom I can tell you I don't have money, but what I do have are a very particular set of skills.This story basically has no affiliation with Taken, but I still found this funny for some reason??? Anyway oblivious Klance are on a mission when they get nabbed by some native aliens and caught up in the planet's slave trade. Lance loses Keith and he does not like it very much. Rampage of revenge ensues.Science is... sketchy. Veeeeeery sketchy.





	1. Even Coran would be better

It’s the sound the pod makes that warns Lance they’re about to crash. The shuddering, trembling feeling wasn’t new to him, nor the sudden influx of heat from the metal shell. But that abhorrent screeching noise? Yep, that’s bad.

‘Keith! What the hell are you doing?’ Lance grabbed the back of the pilot’s seat and shook it violently. ‘I knew I should have been the pilot! You’re going to get us killed!’

‘Shut up Lance!’ At least the Red Paladin looked stressed as they hurtled toward their doom.

Something creaked and groaned from behind them, and there was the ripping sound of metal detaching from the underside of the pod.

The ground was approaching terrifyingly fast. Lance couldn’t close his eyes, even though he was sure he wanted to.

 

There was an abrupt sensation of weightlessness - like when an elevator first drops - and the shuddering stopped. Then there was whiplash. The two paladins, pressed back into their seats by the momentum of their fall into the planet’s gravity, were thrown forward, Lance into the bruising embrace of his belt, and Keith into the navigation panel.

‘What the hell was that?’ Lance shrieked.

Keith tried to straighten up and correct the controls. ‘Tractor beam. There’s a-’

Another impact jolted the pod, slamming them back into their chairs. Keith coughed. ‘-a building on the planet surface. It’s dragging us in.’

‘Can’t you get out of it!?’ Lance could feel that the pod had resumed its course to the surface of the planet. Still horribly fast, but steadily, now, without the painful sound of warping metal.

‘No.’ Keith was gritting his teeth. ‘Get your rifle out.’

Lance pulled out his bayard (because he planned to anyway, not because Keith told him too) and formed the rifle as the pod evened out and started a slow, captive descent into the depths of the docking station below.

 

They’d freed themselves from their seats and were facing the door, Lance with his rifle trained at chest level, Keith with his sword held out in front of him. They both had their shields up.

Moments passed. Keith shifted impatiently from foot to foot. Lance glared at the door, felt his eyes narrow in suspicion, and widen into confusion.

Nothing breached the door. There was no sound from outside the pod.

‘Maybe they’re not hostile.’ Lance suggested hopefully, slightly lowering the rifle.

‘Don’t count on it.’ Keith snapped. He stayed poised, increasingly suspicious as the wait dragged on. Lance rolled his eyes. Trust Keith to be a buzzkill. And how come they always ended up in these situations together? He’d prefer to be stuck with Hunk, like with the mermaids. Or Pidge or Shiro. It would definitely be nice to get some quality time with Allura. Even Coran would have been more fun than Keith.

Ten minutes must have passed. Keith’s focus was wavering, his patience was long gone. Especially with Lance standing nearby fidgeting and shifting the gun from side to side.

An abrupt smashing noise broke the silence and the pod rocked from side to side. Keith finally lowered his sword, the tip scratching the floor as he lost his balance and toppled into the wall. Lance managed to drop into a crouch before he fell over, but cursed, aiming the gun upwards as the top of the pod split and tore open.

Something huge, metallic and sharp stabbed into the space between the two of them and embedded its point in the floor. Lance swore again. Keith had managed to get into a crouch, and he took a swing at the… talon?

The sword barely scratched the metal sheen of the talon, but at least it dislodged it from the floor and sent it scraping away from them. Lance fired upwards, hitting the oily spinning joints of whatever mechanical creature was attacking them, but creating a cascade of sparks which showered over the two paladins.

Keith lifted an arm to cover his head. ‘Dammit Lance!’

‘I can’t see you being much help!’ Lance shouted back. There was another deafening noise and what was left of the ceiling tore off completely. Both of them ducked instinctively, and a second later a contraption dropped through the hole and clattered to the ground next to the talon. It looked like some kind of metal orb attached to a chain.

Keith growled and swung at the chain.

‘Is this Galra?’ Lance yelled, still firing upwards. He could see something wide and shining moving backwards and forwards over the hole - the body of the machine that was attacking them, maybe?

The orb between them split open. Metallic pincers broke apart and formed a clutching… grappling… thing. A robot claw. Keith swung again, hit the thing, but it latched onto his sword and pulled. It dragged him forward a step, but he wouldn’t let go. Lance thought about shooting it, but the metal talon was lifting and stabbing around a few feet away and it seemed like a priority.

There was a sharp noise and another ball-claw landed, just as the first ripped Keith’s bayard from his grip. He yelled abuse at the thing, and Lance fired a few shots at it, frustration crawling with panic up his spine. He really didn’t want to end up in a Galra cell. The bayard clattered - small and harmless - to the floor. The second claw scrambled towards Keith. Lance tried firing at it, but it didn’t seem to notice. Then it leapt, collided with Keith’s back and wrapped pincers around his arms and neck.

‘Keith!’ Lance fired at the other one, which had abandoned the small bayard in favour of scrabbling towards him, and lunged forward to kick the thing on Keith’s back.

When Keith yelped and lost his balance again, Lance thought he might have dislodged the claw, but when he managed to straighten up he saw the reason for Keith’s distress - the toes of his boots just barely scraping the floor. The chain attached to the claw which had him was taut, moving slowly but with certainty upwards, dragging Keith along with it. He was struggling, pulling at the pincers, but to no avail.

It hadn’t escaped Lance’s awareness that his Red Paladin was being stolen, but there were suddenly more pressing things to consider as something solid attached itself tightly to his leg… the other claw. It was climbing him like a pillar, and Lance couldn’t fire the rifle at such close range without risking burns. He chose to swing it like a club instead, hitting the damn thing over and over as its grip tightened to a painful degree.

He was too busy battering the claw and desperately half-watching Keith’s head and shoulders disappear out of the pod (accompanied by some fairly obscene swearing, even to Lance’s ears), to notice the talon swinging his way until it was too late. It hit the gun he lifted to block it with enough force to send it bouncing away, and then his chest. It was a shove rather than a stab, which was a very small thing to be very grateful for, but it was enough to knock Lance on his ass.

He cursed, dropping his arms instinctively to brace himself, and the claw took vice-tight hold of his thigh and yanked.

He had enough time to see Keith’s feet vanish and hear the sudden silence as the tirade of abuse stopped, before his leg was suddenly in the air and he was being dragged upside-down after it.


	2. Every planet is Tatooine

By the time Lance’s head was clear of what remained of their pod, he was red in the face from the rush of blood and his undignified, useless flailing. There may or may not have been a significant amount of squawking incorporated into the performance. On the plus side, he could now see what was going on outside. It didn’t escape his notice that he could breathe without his helmet (or they would have died immediately after the hull was ruptured, he supposed) or that the talon and the claws seemed to have originated from inside a single huge, fairly horrifying metal spider-type contraption which was scuttling and spinning over the top of the pod wreck like it’d been sprayed with a giant can of intergalactic robotic bug spray.

He could also see Keith again, because they were hanging at about the same height from the belly of the beast. The Red Paladin was unusually still, but Lance couldn’t tell if he was conscious or not. The claw grip on his leg was so tight he could feel it cutting off his blood flow and bruising him through his armour, and it occurred to him that the same degree of force, exerted on Keith’s chest, could have been crushing his lungs despite his breastplate. He tried in vain to flail towards Keith - he was only a few feet away - and called his name.

He thought he might actually have been swinging closer, but the sudden and surprisingly rapid motion of the spider-mech set him spinning in nauseating circles and swinging away again. Beneath him, the tattered remnants of the pod disappeared, replaced with flat solid greyness. He was on the verge of actually throwing up when the claw released his leg unexpectedly and the ground came hurtling towards his face. He took most of the landing on his arms, hitting the ground sideways and rolling because of the momentum instead of face first and splatting like he’d feared.

Something landed with a “ _whump_ ” next to him, but everything was a bit too winded-hazy and still-spinning to focus on.

By the time he managed to get onto his knees without hurling up breakfast, he was surrounded.

The aliens weren’t Galra, at least, which meant there was at least a chance this wouldn’t end horribly. They weren’t… familiar. There were about half a dozen, covered head-to-toe in hooded robes and scarves and with most of their features concealed. It was _not_ difficult to make out the distinct features of the short-range plasma rifles they had aimed at Lance’s head.

‘Woah, woah. Okay. Take it easy!’ He lifted his hands reluctantly, trying to analyse the situation through the residual nausea and the aching pain in his leg… not to mention the mild anxiety of having his head blown/melted off. His bayard was still in the pod. He could activate his shield, but they had weapons behind him. And-

Keith.

He tried to sneak a careful glance over his shoulder. Keith was still lying where he’d fallen, facedown on the ground, partially curled up either through instinct or an attempt to protect himself from the impact. He wasn’t moving… Lance couldn’t even tell if he was breathing.

He felt a stab of fear. _Dios_. Not like this. Keith was destined to go out in some foolhardy blaze of glory, not from a chest constricting claw machine and a fall.

He said ‘Keith’, urgently, unable to stop himself, and one of the figures shoved a gun closer to his head, spouting a variety of colourful noises Lance assumed was violent alien mercenary trash talk.

He flinched. ’Okay, okay.’ Another one stepped up and grabbed his wrists. He might have thought it was a humanoid grip if it weren’t for the hard, unevenness of the hand (claw?) scraping on his armguard. They knew well enough to secure his hands behind him, which was unfair and problematic.

The nasty one with aggression problems was investigating Keith. Lance resisted the urge to yell at it. A hard yank to his bound arms dragged him, scrambling, to his feet, as he tried to keep an eye on the other Paladin. He tested the tenderness of his leg. Bearable, but not pleasant to walk on. It probably wasn’t broken. He hoped.

One of the aliens had used the back of Keith’s armour to pull his head up. There was blood dripping from his forehead and oozing from his nose… Christ, Lance hoped he hadn’t landed headfirst.

 

 

He was frog-marched (limping slightly) across the waxy grey floor. They’d been dragged into some kind of hangar, mostly empty except for a couple of the huge mechanical spider robots and a few rustbucket short-range spacecraft. Someone (or something) behind him had Keith, but he couldn’t see him without craning his neck and evoking a rough response from their captors. There was a circular exit in the slate grey walls, and Lance was pushed towards it.

Outside was… desert and rubble. A red desert. Really more of a mahogany desert, if Lance was being accurate. Mostly sand but with huge chunks of boulder lying around randomly. There weren’t small boulders or even medium sized boulders. Just huge ones. They’d been very specific.

He caught a glimpse over his shoulder of Keith being dragged between two aliens, and clenched his jaw.

Ahead of them, cradled between red-brown stones (the colour of old blood), was a sort of shanty town in a sandy bowl. It was typical desert dweller stuff - sticks and poles and tarpaulins and everything very nomadic and impressive.

Lance was shoved forward between tents until they reached the centre. The settlement seemed to have risen around a tight spiral structure at the centre, gently curved walls made of the same waxy grey substance as in the hangar.

It struck him that it could be some kind of ceremonial architecture, the obvious implication being that he was about to be sacrificed to the gods of this alien race for his divine beauty.

There was a break in the wall - an entryway. Lance swallowed hard and hoped beyond hope that the others were on their way… Or that this was just a weird town meeting and they were about to be politely introduced to the natives as friendly guests. A sharp shove pushed him through the gap in the wall, and he felt a wave of anxiety sweep over him. What the hell was this place?

The strange, circular structure was divided into smaller circles with passages between honeycomb blocks of wall. And with a sick sensation he realised that the honeycomb walls were divided into perfectly even blocks… of cages.

They passed through another gap, into one of the inner circles… more cages. The backs, floors and ceilings of the cages was made out of solid matter, but the sides and front were bars. Most of the cages were occupied, and with increasing horror Lance started recognising species he’d encountered before. Hostile aliens, friendly aliens and gentle aliens alike populated the cells of this prison. Lance thought it was a prison. He hoped it was a humane (alienane?) prison, where they’d maybe be allowed to rest and recover until Allura arrived and explained that crash-landing on their planet was all a big misunderstanding, not an intergalactic felony.

He was jerked to a halt in front of an empty cage. The creature in the cage on the right cowered into the corner. Lance tried not to let the bubbling fear in his stomach overwhelm his rationality.

If only he’d had more of that to begin with.

An alien pulled open front of the cage. Another cut the bindings on his wrists and nudged Lance forward until he was on the threshold, and he mustered the courage to say ‘Look, I think there’s been some miscommunication-’

The sound of a plasma weapon charging was the aggressive (and singular) response he got.

He stepped into the small, confined space nervously, ducking a little to avoid bumping his head, and turned as one of the aliens shut him in. The arrival of another two, dragging Keith between them like a rag doll, immediately distracted Lance from his predicament. They tossed Keith into the empty cage on the left, and he landed with the same heart-stopping limpness as before.

Lance didn’t hesitate before crouching and shoving his hands, arms, a good portion of his shoulder through the bars. They were waiting… watching… but he had to know if Keith was alive, at the very least.

It was frustratingly hard to find a pulse around the armour, but Keith stirred faintly when Lance pulled him closer, and by God if that didn’t make Lance nearly cry with relief.

Everything was less terrifying now he knew he wasn’t alone here. Keith was reckless and irritating, but Lance had full faith in his loyalty and his bullheadedness. Even if Keith couldn’t get them out of this place, Lance couldn’t have faced the idea of losing him.

 

 

Lance liked to think of the story as starting- “It was just a routine mission…”

It hadn’t been. Since when had anything ever been routine for the paladins of Voltron? It hadn’t even been Galra soldiers who’d caused this mess. It had been yet another fun astronomical chart malfunction (jury was still out on whether it was individual or technological) which had prevented the team from identifying which out of three potential planets was harbouring fugitives from the Galra empire. Why wouldn’t they be able to tell which planet was the right one? Well… Lance hadn’t really been listening. something to do with corrupt data and incomplete coordinates or… whatever. Shiro had felt it would be good bonding time if they split up… He took the Black Lion with Hunk, Pidge and Coran took the Green Lion, and Lance and Keith had… argued so much about whether to take Red or Blue that eventually Allura had banned them from taking either. Lance blamed Keith’s shitty attitude. Keith blamed Lance’s whole personality.

Lance wasn’t sure about the other paladins and Coran, or even Allura. The second he and Keith had jumped through the wormhole Allura had created for them, they’d landed in an (unrecorded) asteroid field. Not only that, but there was some extreme electromagnetic radiation which, had bloody Keith let Lance bring Blue, wouldn’t have mattered, but cut through the communications capacity of the Altean pod like a hot knife through butter. The wormhole had gone _poof!_ the comms had gone down, and then Keith had hit an asteroid.

To be entirely fair, the asteroid had hit them.

But Lance still felt Keith’s overconfidence in his own piloting skills had to be somewhat to blame for jinxing the hell out of their mission.

Not only had they crash-landed/been captured, but it hadn’t even been on the right planet in the solar system. They were in a completely different place to where the rescue mission would be looking, when they arrived.

 

 

Half dozing in the back corner of the cage, Lance startled himself awake with the sharp, compulsive fear that the others would jump to the same location, right into the asteroid field. He couldn’t do anything to stop them, or warn them. It was infuriating.

He’d pulled Keith to the back wall through the bars, which had been no piece of cake and seemed to amuse their alien captors no end. There wasn’t much he could do to protect the Red Paladin while there were bars between them, but he was equally concerned about keeping an eye on Keith’s wavering consciousness. He wasn’t bleeding too heavily, but Lance had no idea how to check him for a concussion or internal injuries. There were two aliens still standing outside, watching them. The others had disappeared.

What little light reached them (the cages had ceilings, but the passages where the guards stood were uncovered) was starting to fade by the time a stranger approached along the passage. The guards stood aside respectfully and allowed it free view of Lance’s cell. It was smaller than the robed figures, without a hood, without a weapon, but as it peered (with all four of its eyes) through the bars at the two of them, Lance still felt a wash of alarm.

The creature extended a forked tongue, licked its lips and sections of its chin nervously, and showed sharp incisors.

‘Humans…’ It hissed. Lance straightened up, eagerness overtaking his caution. Whatever the language it spoke, Altean tech translated it through Lance’s psychic connection with Blue.

‘Yes, we- We’re Paladins of Voltron.’ Lance squared his shoulders and announced, trying to emphasise the significance of their rank. Even if the stranger didn’t recognise the title, it might accept the tone as a sign of their importance.

It made a noise, a kind of throaty gasp. Elated, Lance thought he might have had an effect.

‘Humans are rare out here…’ It continued, and with a sinking feeling, Lance realised it was laughing. ‘Humans are good meat.’

Lance swallowed, trying to shake the feeling of dread settling over him.

‘I should warn you… we aren’t alone. We’re part of a team. And the others are coming. I don’t think they’re going to be too impressed to find us imprisoned-’

It wrapped an unhealthy number of fingers around the bars on the front of the cage and continued to laugh. ‘You are a weak species. No number of your kind can threaten the Ventri.’

‘Who… What are the Ventri? What is this place?’ Lance forced his voice to stay steady, stay assertive.

‘We are the Ventri.’ It hissed. There had to be at least seven fingers (long and multi-jointed like E.T.) around the bar now. Lance grimaced. ‘We trade. In unique goods.’

Lance shot a sideways glance to his left, at the figure curled up in the corner of the cell next to his. Another figure moved in the cell beyond that. He couldn’t see much in the poor light, but he would have bet good money on other figures shoved into other cells around the length of the circle.

He sucked in a deep, trembling breath.

Slave traders.


	3. Lance is *screaming internally*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I... may have had a bit to drink so many apologies for mistakes.  
> (This has now been edited slightly to correct for some tense issues and grammar problems, sorry if that has confused anything - also some very minor logical modifications were made to chapter 2)

The translator - whatever it was - insisted that Lance stripped off his armour. They did him the kindness of leaving him the insulated body suit, but the loss of the hard metal shell was still a blow. When they shoved into Keith’s cell Lance felt his heart rate pick up, but they merely repeated the process, pulling pieces of armour off his suit.

‘Hey-’ Lance edged up to the bars dividing the cells, watching the guards haul Keith about like a puppet. ‘Don’t- Be careful!’

They dropped him back on the floor without a glimmer of concern. Lance crouched and reached through to Keith’s shoulders, pulling him over nervously. It can’t have been good that Keith was still unconscious. What if he was dying? What if his brain was bleeding? Lance couldn’t do anything to help, and it was scaring him.

Their watchful committee had gone, taking the chunks of armour with them. Lance felt a little less reluctant to brush his fingers against Keith’s forehead, investigating the source of the blood, the extent of the damage. It was a split rather than a cut, so maybe he had hit his head in the fall. His nose was broken, not just bleeding. His breathing was fairly deep and steady, which reassured Lance at least. There wasn’t any way he could check Keith’s ribs while he was still in the suit, especially not separated by bars, but he seemed like he was holding steady.

Lance left his hand on Keith’s chest anyway, monitoring the rise and fall of his breathing as the sun went down. It was getting to be uncomfortably cold, and he was grateful for the protection the body suits afforded them.

Keith stirred a while after the Ventri were gone. He didn’t make much of a fuss, to Lance’s irritation, just brushed off his hand and sat up against the side of the cage.

‘What happened? Where are we?’ His voice was low and angry, and yet surprisingly cogent for someone with potential brain damage.

‘We… are, er… imprisoned.’ Lance hesitated. What was the best way to explain without to sending Keith into a rage spiral? ‘In a slave trading camp.’

Yup. He’d ripped that bandaid off good.

Keith didn’t respond, and Lance could only see the back of his head. After a few ticks he looked to the side and Lance could see the hard line of his jaw.

‘Armour and bayards-’

‘Gone.’ Lance confirmed. ‘Also, they don’t seem impressed by Voltron, so I don’t think they’ve heard of us. Which is a little rude, frankly, seeing as we defeated Zarkon and all that.’

Silence again. Lance was back to wishing he was trapped with somebody - _anybody_ \- else.

‘How do we get out of here?’

Lance shrugged, and Keith turned to face him, looking sour even in the dark. ‘Good work, Lance.’

Keith wasn’t certain how long he’d been out, but it was dark, and Lance had obviously been awake and interacting with the natives, so surely he could have come up with some ideas, at the very least.

Lance scowled and puffed up instinctively. ‘I was trying to negotiate away out of here while you were getting your beauty sleep, Princess, don’t get shitty with me. What’s your groundbreaking plan, anyway?’

Keith glared at him. ‘Get out. Steal a ship. Complete the mission.’

‘Ohhhhh, okaaaaaay.’ Lance rolled his eyes. ‘Have at it, MacGyver, show us your miraculous powers of escape.’

Keith started to move, hissed, and slumped back.

‘What’s wrong?’ Lance couldn’t stop a speck of concern entering his voice, but it seemed to go unnoticed.

‘Nothing.’ Keith snapped. He shifted onto his knees slowly and crawled to the front of the cage. Reluctantly, Lance followed him.

‘This-’ He pulled the circular contraption attached to the front of the gate and squinted at it. ‘-looks like a padlock.’

‘Genius!’ Lance said sarcastically. ‘I’ll just use my intensive training in interplanetary lock picking to get us out, shall I?’

‘Say something constructive, or shut up.’ Keith answered angrily, dropping his voice even lower.

‘Okay. You’re a dumbass! There you go.’

Keith grabbed the bar between their faces with a grip tight enough to turn his knuckles white and lifted his other fist. Lance absolutely _did not_ flinch, except for a little bit initially. After a moment Keith let his hand drop and turned back to the padlock.

‘Maybe there’s a structural weakness somewhere.’ Lance supplied helpfully, prodding the hinges of his cage.

‘Which we would be able to find if we had degrees in engineering and a week.’ Keith growled. ‘But we don’t.’

‘It’s always blast a path with you, isn’t it?’ Lance groaned. ‘Subtlety is not a hallmark of yours.’

‘Intelligence is not a hallmark of yours.’ Keith said shortly, aware before he’d even started to speak that it wasn’t his wittiest repartee. He had a splitting headache though, and his ribs hurt like he’d been bear-hugged by a literal bear. And it was dark, which meant he couldn’t really see what he was doing, even if he had known anything about the specifics of alien locking mechanisms.

Lance spent a little time picking at the edges of his cell. The metal was slightly rusty, but still strong. Eventually he returned to the back wall, his dignity comfortably safe in the awareness that Keith wasn’t having any luck with his strategy either.

 

 

‘Lance.’ Something jabbed into his shoulder and he grumbled. ‘ _Lance!_ ’

He shot up, blinking and flailing, and felt Keith’s fingers catch in his hair. ‘Ugh, what- What?’ His neck hurt from sleeping on the ground, and he knew, just _knew_ he was going to smell like cage sweat for the duration of this mission. Wrong.

Keith nodded forward, pulling his arm back between the bars and out of Lance’s space.

There was a smaller detachment of Ventri assembling outside the cages. Lance tensed automatically, feeling disgust and anxiety sink through his empty stomach like a bad taco.

They went for the alien on Lance’s left first, a small, iridescent green creature which screeched as they dragged it out. It had spindly, bat-like wings attached to its back, and distinctively huge eyes above a short beak.

Keith had already discovered his knife had been taken along with the armour, which was frustrating, if not unexpected. There would be hell to pay for that alone. Nothing would stand in the way of him getting that knife back.

In any case, it was down to hand-to-hand combat if they came to get him and Lance. He couldn’t quite pinpoint the nature of the entities he was looking at - layered fabric disguised potential weak spots or the extent of their limbs. Their faces, half hidden under hoods and scarves, didn’t reveal much either, except for multiple glistening eyes embedded in slate-grey skin. Keith moved into a crouch, sensing Lance’s similar motions nearby.

Lance was already certain Keith was going to do something stupid, probably something suicidal, potentially something which would get them both killed. He wasn’t exactly willing to take the creepy translator’s word for it, but he did think it was possible that humans were substantially outclassed in a fistfight with the Ventri. For him and Keith, the Ventri’s comparative size alone was a negative factor, let alone their numbers, their guns, and any probable armour hidden by the robes. At any assessment, the Paladins were outnumbered and heavily disadvantaged. Lunging into this fists-first wasn’t going to be an effective strategy.

He didn’t get much of an opportunity to communicate this to Keith, though.

They opened both cages simultaneously, no doubt predicting some defensive behaviour. Keith lunged at the first opportunity, aiming high then low, using his speed as his primary tactic. His fists hit solid mass, both at the head and the lower torso, and sent shockwaves along the nerves of his arms. He tried ducking to sweep his opponent’s legs out, but it was like trying to kick a solid stone pillar. He barely managed to roll out of the way as the first alien swung a gun at his head, but couldn’t move fast enough to avoid the curled glove of the second. It literally floored him, sparking a fresh surge of staticky noise and pain through his already aching head.

Lance had met the unfriendly end of a gun before he’d even properly straightened up, and raised his hands in polite acquiescence. He was secured in time to see Keith get taken out, and winced. Kid was probably going to need a few rounds in a healing pod with this level of head trauma.

Other guards had moved on down the line of cages, selecting prisoners seemingly at random. Lance hoped this wasn’t a purge. They carried heavy weapons, cylindrical but narrowing to a small barrel. Laser? Or a small projectile. Which would mean the thick end of the gun housed some kind of chemical propellant, or held a chamber for impact-igniting projectiles like large bullets. There was no external cartridge, so he couldn’t really plan to snatch it. He’d just have to take the whole damn gun. Little sketchy on the details of how to do that while his hands were tied behind his back though.

Keith was ahead of him, stumbling slightly as he tried to keep up with the aliens on either side of him. Lance was just hoping at this point that resistance didn’t invoke some kind of punishment. Other than, obviously, a sharp blow to the head. It was already morning… or the equivalent on this planet. It didn’t seem like a long night, so the rotation could have been faster (although the gravity didn’t feel unusually intense) or they were just very close to the poles. Lance had expected them to head outwards towards the settlement, but they were dragged further into the cage spiral. The centre was a wide, sandy clearing. There were at least six other aliens already lined up, on their knees (or other, similar appendages) and Lance watched as Keith was shoved down next to him. A second later he joined him, looking sideways to evaluate the degree of additional damage on the Red Paladin’s face. He looked exhausted, under sunlight, mildly shocked at the very least.

Keith was thinking along similar lines about Lance. The Blue Paladin looked unpleasantly shaken up by the rough night’s sleep. Keith couldn’t help but worry about what had been done, what Lance had seen while he’d been unconscious. They were Paladins. They had to have each others’ backs.

The aliens orchestrating this nightmare had circled around them, blocking the exits, ready to put down anyone who struggled, but there were new players on the scene. Bigger. Massive, in fact. Keith felt his anger ebbing away, replaced with anxious energy. He didn’t understand the logic of this line-up. Six aliens to Lance’s left, two on Keith’s right. Each was unique, relatively small, but definitely not all native. But the new aliens - examining the line of prisoners exactly like someone would inspect the meat on offer at a butcher’s shop - were big and imposing and Keith couldn’t pinpoint a single weakness. He snuck a look at Lance, noting the tightness of his cheeks and his sharp gaze, and comforted himself with the thought that Lance was gonna back him up. Lance was a Paladin. They could rely on each other.

The alien on Keith’s right arched its back and clicked in a hurried, panicked expression of anxiety. Keith spared it a worried glance, but at a wave of the… hand? limb? whatever it was… from the new form of alien, the creature was heaved away from the lineup and escorted (roughly) from the clearing. Lance’s shoulder brushed against Keith’s. He tried not to glance around too fast, sensing the concern of the other Paladin.

Another prisoner was removed from the other end of the lineup, then another, then another. There were only six of them left. Lance looked around with less discretion, fear climbing into his throat. He wasn’t certain of the criteria for removal here. The winged entity from the neighbouring cell was gone. Another with large, somewhat distended claws had been dragged away. Yet another which apparently lacked opposable thumbs was banished. He couldn’t fathom why he and Keith remained. They’d been there overnight (a short night) and they were already up for sale?

A brief interaction (short chattering noises and unidentifiable croaks) between the Ventri and the buyers ensued, and suddenly the six prisoners left in the line were being dragged to their feet. Keith twisted against the grip of the alien next to him, and received a sharp slap in response. Lance hissed and half turned towards him, before being jerked back into line.

‘Keith- ?’ It was a question… little more than a whisper.

Wide, dark eyes flickered towards him. Lance couldn’t tell if Keith was as frightened as him, as conscious of the danger posed by these newcomers. Lance had recognised the pattern of elimination. Disproportionate anatomy had been eliminated first, and size subsequently. Of the remaining six, Lance and Keith were the tallest… but not the biggest. A short, yet slightly broader YggBrrtn panted nervously in the line up. Another, unidentified alien had a curiously oversized head. Lance was the tallest in height, third widest at the shoulders at least. Keith was shorter than him and almost imperceptibly more narrow. Then a squeaking marsupial-type creature with fur and a snout (but six-fingers and a thumb on each of three hands), and last of all a tiny, gnome shaped being with a semi-human face and minuscule humanoid hands attached to spindly arms.

Lance wasn’t too worried about the size problem. He wasn’t the smallest here, and neither was Keith, and he was fairly sure that’s the thing to avoid. On the other hand, if they dragged him away first, and he didn’t have Keith in his sights anymore… it would make him feel that coiled acid dread he hated. He can’t watch Keith if he’s not around. He can’t even try and moderate his erratic behaviour.

Lance didn’t feel any satisfaction as the tiny alien was seized first, and dragged away by the newer aliens. He felt bile rise in his throat. He felt Keith’s gaze brush his cheek, searching for… reassurance? encouragement?

The deep, well of dread seemed to awaken when the mouse-thing suffered the same fate, dragged away by the overwhelmingly large interlopers. How many did they want? And what for? Lance couldn’t process the risk of being hauled aboard some foreign vessel to be shipped to distant planets, leaving their connection with Voltron further and further behind.

They were still standing. Lance felt Keith’s shoulder strike his, apparently unintentionally. The Red Paladin was wavering. Every time he blinked his eyes hung closed a little longer than the last time…

He might have been pretending. The contact between them was another mark of camaraderie. A balm for Lance’s nerves. He knew… He assumed Keith had realised too… the next victim, if there was to be one, would be Lance. And even if the separation were as brief as a few minutes, Lance wasn’t sure it wouldn’t scar him for life. He didn’t know what their fate was likely to be, in the hands of these creatures, but if either of them suffered it alone the discomfort was bound to be several times amplified.

A hard grip tightened around Keith’s upper arm, shoving him forward. He struggled but without much conviction. He didn’t want to evoke too much malice at this point. A tiny shred of favour might prevent the Ventri from throwing him or Lance to the wolves.

Maybe he shouldn’t have been surprised to find that he didn’t have that kind of luck.

One of the larger aliens shuffled forward to inspect him, eyes with vast pupils scraping up and down his frame in a frankly terrifying manner, and he felt another huge, thick fingered hand-like appendage wrap around the back of his neck.

‘ _Keith!_ ’

It may have been the most times Lance had used Keith’s name without an insult attached, but all Lance could think - watching his Red Paladin… his _responsibility_ \- being dragged away by a gigantic, meaty paw on the back of his neck, was that this could be the time he yelled Keith’s name and it _mattered_ … it really, really, mattered.

And then the alien with Keith in its clutches disappeared out of the inner ring of cages, and Lance waited for his turn. Waited, a little unnaturally desperate, for his chance to follow.

As the rest of the interlopers withdrew… as the Ventri dragged the other prisoners and Lance out of the clearing in the wrong direction… Lance felt the rest of his courage sink from his chest to his stomach and lower. Sickeningly, through his pelvis, dragging his energy out through his toes. He’d lost Keith…

And he couldn’t think of a single goddamn way to get him back.


	4. How many head injuries before date?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know nothing happens, and I'm sorry.   
> Can nobody ever kidnap me, please, because I am unprepared in a big way. Escaping things requires a degree of effort I am not willing to provide (or, potentially, capable of).

He started struggling as he was hauled back towards the cages. Christ, he had no idea what was going to happen to Keith, he couldn’t just go along with this. It had been a mistake, to take the path of least resistance. He should have fought with Keith. Maybe together they would have been able to get loose before this happened.

His arms were still bound and the Ventri were still brandishing guns like overexcited eight-year-olds, but if they got him back into that cage… There was no getting back to Keith.

It wasn’t rope, exactly, around his wrists. It was something softer, something taut and cutting. Strips of some form of leather, maybe, from a native animal? He’d be able to work himself free with enough time, but that was what he was short on. That and weaponry. He strained his arms against the pressure anyway, twisting his hands while throwing his weight into ducking and weaving with his shoulders to try and distract the guards. How far away was the cage? Only a couple minutes walk, but the Ventri were very slightly delayed by the process of other prisoners being returned to their own cells. One of the guards was just in front of Lance, one just behind. There wasn’t enough room for them all to walk side-by-side. Lance was only concerned about the one behind him watching his hands, so he kicked and wriggled and eventually felt a large hard hand (too many fingers - ugh) strike his spine. The blow sent him sprawling - already off-balance from the jumping about -forwards, bouncing off the shoulder of the guard in front and onto the ground. He folded up his legs, spring kicking the one which leaned down to grab him. It wasn’t much of a deterrent, but startled it enough to give Lance an opportunity to tug his palm down against the leather. There wasn’t much room to work with. He wasn’t even sure if that space hadn’t already been there, and that he was fooling himself into thinking he was having any effect at all.

They dragged him back to his feet, and he ignored the bruising grip that settled onto the back of his neck in favour of focusing on trying to get his thumb free. It hurt, but he’d keep going until it dislocated if he had to. _Dios_ , he thought this was his row. It all looked the same, though, and maybe he had more time.

Yes! His thumb was free, and apparently intact, if aching. He used it to drag the strips down his other hand, scraping off skin as they went. He recognised the alien in the cell next to Keith’s, and speed was really his only option now.

As the strips slipped off his fingers, he dropped to a crouch. He’d noted the futility of Keith’s attacks, so he didn’t bother lashing out at the robed figure. Instead, he let the Ventri’s surprise continue carrying it forward. The barrel of the gun dipped slightly as the creature ascertained Lance’s new position, but not fast enough to target him before he’d bounced back up, grabbing the gun and slamming his shoulder into the stock at the same time. He was praying there was enough force in his spring to dislodge the Ventri’s grip.

Whether it was surprise or strength that won out, Lance felt the gun shift and start to fall, and he snatched it sideways. Something hit the back of his leg, but he registered the starburst of pain in the back of his mind like it was a curious artefact. He flipped the gun, dodging the swinging limb of the Ventri, and fired upwards. Head, skull, face… whatever was under the hood was obviously not impervious to superheated plasma propelled projectiles, and it disintegrated violently.

The body stayed upright for a moment, and Lance ducked around it to avoid the grasp of the other guard, which had struck his leg with its own gun and was trying to reorient it in his direction. A blast from the gun toppled the body, nearly crushing Lance, who skipped out of the way and returned fire.

Creatures in nearby cages were starting to screech and howl, and call out in unfamiliar languages. A scorching bullet whistled past Lance’s face, buried itself in the wall behind him. Whatever species had designed these weapons had done wonders with making the plasma mechanism portable, but the gun was still too heavy for Lance. It hindered his movement, his ability to dodge. Unencumbered by its own gun, the Ventri was pulling back along the path, making noises Lance sensed were not encouragement.

He fired an impressively efficient volley, making the Ventri (which had self-preservation instincts clearly more advanced than Lance’s own) duck and cover. Lance saw his chance, lifted the gun above his head and tossed it onto the cement-like ceiling of the cell next to him. Something moved in the shadows of the cell, nearly startling him away, but suddenly a creature scuttled from the back of the cell to the front and extended a limb through the bars. It was more like an elbow than an arm - maybe a joint under a tough layer of skin. It looked like the top of a wing, but it stretched down to a claw buried in the dirt. Lance understood the meaning through intuition more than logic, loosed a stream of rapid, scrambled apologies, and boosted himself up to the roof.

Another bullet seared overhead. Lance dropped to his stomach and rolled to the far edge of the hard surface of the ceiling, until the Ventri guard was out of view. It left him exposed on the far side, though. If reinforcements came along that path he was done for.

 _Keith_. Goddamn it, he had to keep going.

He rolled off the roof into the far passage, pulling the gun with him, and landed in a crouch. He really should try to get back to that alien who had helped him, but he’d already lost valuable time for chasing after the Red Paladin. He had no idea how much ammunition he had left, but chaos was an appealing option right then. Keith would have loved that.

He lifted the gun and blasted the padlock on the cell closest to him. The inhabiting alien obviously wasn’t as clear on his intentions as the last one, so he pulled the gate open and moved on to the next cell.

He got five cells along, releasing at least two fairly energetic creatures and several more slightly lethargic ones, before he heard the Ventri tramping along the path towards him. More screeching had started up in this row, hopefully confusing them. He shot off another lock, pulled the gate open, and used the scorched, melted metal as a foothold to get onto the hard top of the back cages. He could see the flapping, sand coloured structures of the settlement from this vantage point, but Keith had been taken in the other direction, and he couldn’t risk a delay in searching for more weapons.

Somehow, the combination of loose aliens on the ground and Lance’s careful progress along the faintly curved surface allowed him to pass the worst of the Ventri blockade. It was slower, painfully slower than he wanted to go, crouching and crawling just out of sight, having to lie flat and still at times. The sunlight started to scorch, and the substance beneath him was getting uncomfortably hot. The body suit was protecting him from contact, but even it was starting to feel a little stifling, not to mention being entirely the wrong colour for a game of hide and seek in the desert.

Lance would have given anything for the cool bulletproof interior of the Blue Lion right now. In fact, Lance would have given anything for just his bayard right now, or _even_ just his angry angsty little copilot.

He was trying not to think about it. Time was vanishing on him. And even though he knew Keith was tough - hard as nails, in fact, if Lance was being honest - it was hard to ignore the sheer size of the aliens that had taken him. It was also hard to stop himself thinking of their possible twisted motives, some so traumatising Lance wondered at his own brain.

When he’d gotten clear of the build up of Ventri trying to recapture their rampant prisoners, and the din had faded into the distance, Lance stood up and ran. The size of the outer loop of cages was disturbingly large. The settlement had long since faded into the distance, and Lance pushed his lungs and legs to burning sprinting alongside sweeping sand dunes and broken chunks of rock.

Something was coming up, a break in the curve of the circle. Beyond it, wavering slightly in a heat-haze, a broad sunburnt plain. There were bigger ships there than in the hangar, all different designs and origins, nestled into the sand. There were barricades between the ships and the prison, but Lance felt glee bubble through his veins. If there were ships, he could fly out of here.

Dread arrived a moment later. He didn’t have Keith with him, which was bad enough, but the rate at which ships were arriving and departing was worse. He didn’t have a clue which ship Keith might have been consigned to, if it hadn’t already take off. One of the bigger ones, for certain, but there were a couple of ships the size of small cities out there in the distance, some of them possibly as large as the Castle. One or two looked like they might have been Galra ships.

Lance stopped and crouched. There was a gate set into the wall up ahead, which seemed fairly pointless since most species wouldn’t have much trouble climbing onto the roof if they managed to breach the barricades. Between the prison and the barricade there was a series of buildings, structures more solid than the tent settlement Lance had left behind. He guessed that this was the point of transaction, which meant Keith must have passed through relatively recently, and maybe Lance would be able to find some suggestion of where he’d gone, if he wasn’t still there.

 

 

 

At that moment, Keith Kogane was on a ship breaking from orbit. His head was ringing, but he could still feel the slight turbulence accompanying the ship’s exit, mediated as it was through layers and layers of infrastructure between him and the vacuum of space.

Whatever life support system these aliens used, it wasn’t human-friendly. He’d been light-headed and dizzy (another wonderful contribution to the ache that was becoming a familiar as his own thoughts) since they’d brought him onboard, although that could have been down to the repeated head injuries sustained over the past two? three? days.

Between the market, with Lance at his side, and the damp, dark, metal-grate hellhole he was in now, there had been a full negotiation between these bastards and the Ventri. The furry little creature (now burrowed into an unyielding corner of their dungeon) and the little vaguely humanoid one (sitting behind him staring vacantly into the dark) had been with him, under the merciless gaze of the slave traders. One of them - unhooded - had spoken to him, in foreign, clipped English.

’Look at the sun, human.’

It had a face like the back of a crab, sunbleached pale but hard like a shell, with multiple black eyes buried deep into drill-holes. No wonder Keith’s attacks had been ineffectual. If the whole damn alien was covered in that stuff, they wouldn’t need armour to repel hand-to-hand violence.

It had buried hard-crusted fingers into his hair, holding his scalp like the casing of a nut ready to be cracked, and twisted his face to the sky.

‘This is the last one you will ever see.’

Keith had growled, but even mere attempts to struggle failed. He just felt his skull being held in a vice grip, and the sunlight stabbing at his face and his eyelids, and when the payment was made, he wasn’t even given the chance to stand. They’d dragged him to the wall, through the shipyard, onto the ship and into this delightful guest suite on his knees.

The suit had held up, but barely. His knees felt bruised and abraded. His arms were raw and wrenched out of place. His head throbbed… and he could taste blood.

He only hoped Lance was doing a better job escaping than him.

If Lance could get back to Voltron, maybe Red would be able to find him. Or maybe Voltron was minutes away from tracking down Lance. That would put a stop to the slave trade in the quadrant, for sure, and ensure the safety of the Blue Paladin.

He didn’t want to acknowledge the possibility that Lance would get sold on as well, but any idiot who tried to buy Lance was guaranteed to get more than he bargained for, so there was some consolation in that.

If Keith could get out, he’d find an escape pod and get himself and the other two prisoners off the ship, go back for Lance, meet up with the other Paladins, and destroy the outpost, liberating its captives. He just had to find a way to survive until then.


	5. Keith's honestly just so tired rn.

It wasn’t long before they came back. They took all three of them from the dungeon. Keith had worked his hands free, but it wasn’t particularly helpful for resistance against the aliens. One of their splayed hands was nearly the width of Keith’s armspan. A single blow was enough to send him flying a few feet through the air.

Normally, Keith would have been planning his moves before he even heard them coming. He would have been buzzing, ready for a fight… even one he couldn’t win. But this headache was wrecking him. And the air felt thin and vile.

The first hit was the last. It took what was left of his breath away, left him sprawled facedown on the floor. He wanted to fight… he tried to summon all the energy he had left.

What was the goal, here? What did they want?

He pressed his fingers against the metal grate and pushed himself to his knees, grunting.

He needn’t have bothered. One of the aliens snatched him up as it passed, pulling him upright effortlessly.

A series of coarse metal corridors blurred into a a haze as he was dragged along. Keith wondered if Lance was okay. He was sure he would be. Lance was… difficult. Childish, at times. But he could take care of himself.

So could Keith, usually, but at this point he couldn’t help but think an extra pair of hands might have been worthwhile. Shiro’s hands, preferably, especially the metal one. But Lance’s would have done the trick in a pinch.

Keith’s escort stopped, and he fuzzily registered that he couldn’t see his fellow prisoners. Had they been separated? He had to remember to go after them, if he ever managed to get his head back in the game.

He tried to catch his breath and focused on his situation. One opponent in front of him, detaching a sheet of metal from the top of the corridor wall. Two behind, both kind of rudely unconcerned about Keith posing any threat. They were communicating in an unfamiliar language, close enough to human speech that Keith could practically hear the boredom accompanying casual remarks.

Behind the metal sheet was another, smaller, one side of a metal shaft built into the top of the wall. Vents? Keith thought it might have been vents, although why it would be behind two unperforated slabs of metal which looked as thick as hull-quality steel was a mystery.

The vent was about 20 inches square. Keith was shaking his head just a few seconds after he saw it, ignoring the blossoming pain behind his eyes. A meaty paw landed on his back (the whole of his back).

’No… No. No!’ It scooped him off the ground, oblivious to Keith’s writhing and kicking. He swore and swiped at the face of the alien holding him. ‘I’m not small enough! Wait, dammit, I’m not small enough. Stop!’

Another of the creatures stepped past and tossed something glittering into the gaping entry to the vent. Keith focused long enough to recognise it as his knife. His Blades of Marmora knife. Perhaps they thought that would coax him in there.

They would have been right, except that he genuinely wasn’t going to fit.

That little sidenote wasn’t going to deter them from trying any time soon. Keith’s head knocked against the bottom of the open metal plate as the alien lifted him up eagerly.

Why vents? Why, tiny, apparently unlit, suffocating little vents? Especially on this big-ass ship? The corridor they were standing in alone could have fit a banquet table from wall to wall (without seating compromises).

‘Agh-’ He lifted both arms over his head as the second attempt had his collarbones hit the bottom of the opening. He grabbed for the knife, glittering faintly inside the metal shaft, but it was too much encouragement for the alien holding him up.

In an instant, the hand lifting him by the back of the bodysuit had opted for shoving, pushing his torso into the darkness, grabbing his legs and mashing them in afterwards.

He still didn’t fit. His head cracked into the far wall, followed swiftly by his neck and shoulders. Lying on his side, there was pressure crushing his shoulders between the top of the vent and the bottom. His head thumped into the metal again as they tried to bundle his legs in. He narrowly avoided impaling himself on his own blade.

It was an instinct to curve his shoulders to protect his head, but with his knees shoved against his chest, one arm pinned underneath his own weight along with his newly recovered weapon and one vast hand blocking his exit, he was trapped in the vent. It disappeared upwards ahead of him, blanketed in darkness, tunnelling up into the ceiling.

With some difficulty he managed to straighten out, freeing his knife wielding hand, but before he had a chance to stab the huge digits in his way, the hand withdrew and the metal plate slammed back into place. Squashed inside, Keith couldn’t raise his leg to kick the damn thing, so he settled for kneeing at it violently and shouting.

Technically, he fit in the vent. But without holding his chest at a permanent diagonal angle, the pressure pinned his shoulders, restricting his movement. If he’d been any broader he’d be wedged.

Ah. So that’s why they’d only taken the smallest. Goddamn Lance and his stupid shoulders.

No. He didn’t want Lance to be here. He’d never live this down if Lance found out. Also, unless he found a way to cut or prise his way through two layers of metal, it might be helpful to have someone trying to break him out from the outside.

So being small enough to fit into the vents was his main claim to fame in this scenario… but there was still no real explanation as to why he was in the vents in the first place. Or why he was armed…

He turned the knife in his palm. It did restore a level of comfort. He started combat crawling forward, shoulders scraping along the walls. There was enough padding in the suit to stop it from hurting, but it was infuriatingly difficult to move. The metal wasn’t slippery like in vents on Earth, so he could follow the tilting surface upwards, but its coarseness ensured his progress was slow.

 

 

 

Lance dropped off the roof and crept behind the buildings lining the path to the airfield. It sounded like there was heavy traffic passing along it, and if Lance could obtain a disguise he could possibly sneak through, find out where Keith had been taken, and get a ship in one smooth move.

He ducked across a gap between buildings, glancing across at the aliens tracking past. Most were bigger than humans, but a few smaller figures suggested he could blend in without arousing too much suspicion.

He snuck forward, edged around the corner of the building. A couple passing aliens spared him curious glances but didn’t stop.

Lance kept sliding along the wall until he could duck into a gap in the crowd. No arms reached out to snatch at him, and the weight of the gun was a heavy reassuring presence at his thigh. Most of the buildings were open at the front, hung with fabric to keep the sand out. Many seemed similar to market stalls, displaying clothing and items presumably stolen from prisoners or traded from the ships passing through.

It piqued Lance’s interest. The Paladin armour could be here, as well as their missing bayards. He ventured into one of the shops, weaving between objects hung from the ceiling with hooks. There were a couple of robes, but it took patience and the careful evasion of prying eyes before he was able to steal a robe and dodge back into the crowd, flinging it over his shoulders. New plan. Find their stuff, find Keith, get home.

 

It wasn’t as straightforward as Lance was hoping. He ducked in and out of most of the buildings along the road to the shipyard, and had to resort to backtracking when he ran out of options. It was only when he caught sight of the smaller Ventri from earlier, the unhooded one which had spoken English and disputed Lance’s capabilities (ha!), that he felt he was getting somewhere. He dodged behind a lumbering alien the size of a small vehicle and peeked around it, tracking the movements of his target. It was a shame the damn thing had two hooded guards accompanying it, but Lance had his own form of company, in the form of an increasingly familiar plasma cannon.

As the lumbering alien passed the building (too close to the boundary of the prison for Lance’s comfort) the Ventri had entered, Lance swung the cannon up to his shoulder and nipped inside. One guard was facing away from him. Lance dispatched him efficiently. The second returned a couple of shots, but Lance had the element of surprise, not to mention well-practised dodging skills. In a few seconds it was just him with the cannon trained on the obnoxious little git in front of him.

‘Ah…’ The tongue flickered in and out, and Lance stifled the urge to shudder. ‘It was the human.’

Damn right. Takes more than a mercenary alien force to keep Lance McClain locked up.

There was a table between him and the creature, but as far as he could tell it was unarmed. Around the edges of the room were more tables, shelves, boxes and crates, some spilling with foreign-looking objects, some empty. He stayed cautious, moving slowly, watching him down the barrel of the gun.

‘Where’s my partner?’ He demanded, feeling the roughness of the words on a dry throat.

The alien laughed, and Lance felt his jaw tighten into a sneer. He stabbed forward with the gun, satisfied to see the damn thing twitch nervously.

‘Where is he? Where’s our armour?’

Lance was torn between trying to keep his priorities intact, and the feeling of foreboding climbing his spine. If Keith wasn’t here, he might already been gone. He might already be… dinner. Yes, Lance needed the armour, but if there was any chance he could get to Keith before anything happened to him… before he was gone… Christ, he was going to take it.

He’d convinced himself he was so close. He’d convinced himself Keith would be stuck in one of these buildings, waiting for some deeply time-consuming business negotiation to take place. But it had been at least two hours, maybe, maybe more.

’The human is gone.’ The Ventri continued, directing a grossly unnerving leer at Lance. ‘The Thothith have the human now.’

Lance felt his stomach drop. ’Where? Where can I find him?’

‘The human can have its things. Funny trinkets.’ It (he?) hissed. It turned and pulled a small open crate off a stack from behind it. Lance nearly flinched, expecting a concealed weapon, but the Ventri just turned and tipped the contents out on the table. It was chunks of their armour, red and blue haphazardly mixed together, and the unformed bayards. Clearly the Ventri, for all their superior strength, hadn’t quite determined the practical uses of the Paladin gear.

Lance eyed the haul, but satisfaction couldn’t break through the chill that was infecting his thoughts.

‘Where is he?’ He gestured with the gun again, hearing fear in his own voice. ‘Where are the Tho- the thoth things?’

‘The human is gone.’ It repeated, still giving Lance that sadistic grin. ‘The Thothith voyage to distant galaxies. Gone from this one now. The human will die soon.’

Lance jerked the weapon involuntarily, but at least the grin slipped slightly. No. The blasted alien was lying. They couldn’t be gone so quickly.

‘What are they going to do to him? What-’ He took a deep breath, trying to calm himself. ‘Where are they going? How can I find him?’

‘The Thothith require small beings.’ It answered. ‘Long journeys through space. The Thothith ships become infested with…’ It gestured vaguely with one many-fingered hand. ‘… vermin. Reluctant to stop. The Thothith use small beings to clear the ventilation… pipes.’

‘Clear?’ Lance swallowed, straightened up. Keith could fight, particularly in hand-to-hand combat. If it was… vermin, not the bloody massive brutes themselves, he stood a good chance of winning.

As if sensing his thoughts, the Ventri stretched its mouth open again gleefully. ’The Thothith breathe metal rich currents. The human will not survive more than two cycles.’

Two cycles? Two cycles on this planet? Because he hadn’t exactly been timing, but they hadn’t seemed even as long as Earth days. What was it saying? That Keith wouldn’t be able to breathe? Or that he’d be breathing toxic air?

Shit. Shit, shit, shit.

‘Tell me where they’re going.’

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm starting to think Keith has broader shoulders than Lance in the show... so... there goes my premise. Oh well, creative licence. Sorry about the hideous warping of the facts.


	6. Remember that time when I didn't have claustrophobia? Yeah. That was nice.

It was darker in the ceiling. It took a long time for his eyes to adjust, and it was still only to obtain a general shadowy sense of his own hands a few centimetres from his face. Keith could feel the air circulating around him, cool and thick, but he wasn’t sure exactly how it was being dispersed from the metal tunnel. He kept moving, thumping the floor routinely to try and gauge the tensile strength of the metal. He was still deciding if he was more opposed to being stuck up here or to falling twelve feet to the ground when the floor gave up underneath him. 

It was relatively quiet up here. The sound of the airflow curving around bends in the vent up ahead and behind him was a soft ocean background noise. He could hear his own breathing, mostly calm, occasionally laboured when he felt particularly lightheaded, or when his lungs started to burn. The oxygen deprivation was subtle, but it took a great deal of self-control not to give in to the sensation that he was being suffocated in a metal coffin. At least Lance wasn’t here. He would have been making a shitty situation unbearable with constant commentary.

When Keith heard a different noise, metal on metal, a kind of repetitive clicking or scratching, he thought he was imagining it. It’d been a while since they’d put him in… nearly an hour? Maybe his brain was cooking up stuff to fill the void of sensory information. He was still fuzzy around the edges, and his head hurt.

The noise got louder, approaching at an uneven rate to his own awkward motion. He hesitated. It could have been from the recess around the vent, or from within the vent itself. The air currents could be making something at a great distance sound closer than it was. Ideally, it was just a fan, or some form of air circulation he wasn’t familiar with.

It didn’t sound like a fan.

The scratching was less metallic now, and accompanied by a quieter, rustling noise. It _was_ close, Keith was sure of it. When he caught the first suggestion of the sound of breathing, he tightened his grip on the knife.

It might have been that little mammal-like alien he’d lost track of in the maze below. Maybe they’d stuck it in at a different location, and waited to see if they ran into each other. That was a weird pastime and a half, though.

It wasn’t slowing down much. He lifted the knife higher, more cautious than worried.

Whatever it was, it was smaller than he expected.

And more vicious.

It reached him rather suddenly, only half-materialising out of the gloom. Keith only saw teeth the size of his fingers, and started lashing out with the knife. It wasn’t ideal - he had no room to manoeuvre, and no idea what he was aiming at. He was basically stabbing blindly into the dark without any real momentum.

Something scraped across the material of the bodysuit on his left arm as he struck something with the hilt of the knife with his right. He tried to twist the blade to stab sideways at it, but sharp pain erupted in his wrist as teeth broke through the protective layer of fabric and pierced his skin.

He dropped the knife, feeling jaws start to crush his wrist, and flailed with his left fist, hitting something furry and definitely alive. The creature relinquished its grip, snapping at his other hand. Keith felt the gust of hot air on his fingers, pulling them out back just in time. He seized the knife, ignoring the burning pain zigzagging up his arm from the punctured skin.

It couldn’t be so difficult. He had 20 inches to work with and a big-ass knife.

Teeth sank into his left arm. The damn thing was getting too close to his face for comfort, and Jesus, that hurt. He turned the knife and swung sideways, using sheer determination to muster enough force to stab through the creature’s hide and slam it into the opposite side of the vent. It thrashed, and started squealing.

He knew for sure it wasn’t the other captive, now. It made a noise like a cross between a rat on fire and a Pterodactyl. Or a Pterodactyl on fire and Lance when he was pissed.

Death throes weren’t enough to get the thing off his arm. He had to lever its jaw open with the knife when it finally went still, and at that point his suit was ripped in several places and there was a general stickiness to everything from his elbow downwards. It felt like bruises and punctures and stings all at once. 

He shoved the corpse away and tried to catch his breath. Fighting in a confined space sucked. Fighting in a confined space without proper oxygen was much worse. And fighting in a confined space without proper oxygen, without proper lighting, on an empty stomach, with two injured arms and what felt like a concussion was just depressing.

He slumped onto one side, trying to angle his shoulder so he didn’t feel so hemmed in.

It didn’t take an idiot to identify why they’d given him the knife. Either he was here to kill vent demons, or he was supposed to get past them in order to do something else. Either way, a few instructions would have been appreciated.

Well, not much. He still would have been pissed as all hell, but it might have helped him not get mauled.

Potential blood poisoning aside, his arms were distractingly painful, and he had nothing to stop the puncture wounds bleeding until they clotted by themselves. He crawled on, determined to keep going in case he could find an exit or a advantageous position now that combat was a possibility. He had to squeeze half-over the rat-thing, trying not to snag himself on the bared teeth. It was long and narrow, furry, multiple legs and claws, probably more than four. What the hell it was doing in the vents? No food up there… unless you counted Keith.

Perhaps it was their version of a cockroach problem, and the damn things climbed out of the vents and got into the food stores.

That particular thing was the first of many. There was another one skittering towards him before ten minutes had passed. It showed up faster than he anticipated, hearing it move, and went straight for his face. Disinclined to be cautious, Keith stabbed it as soon as it was within reach. He realised shortly afterwards that the damn thing had popped out of a vent splitting off to the right.

Great. Now he had to watch for unexpected arrivals as well as checking his flank.

 

 

 

Lance had gleaned enough information from the interrogation to know where he was going, or at least a general direction. All he had to do was get into a ship without being killed. He'd replaced his own armour and equipped his bayard. Keith's was slung into a bag over his shoulder. 

The warning about the danger posed to Keith circled his brain endlessly, a quiet hum of fear sitting in the pit of his stomach. A Paladin couldn't fight air. He might not even realise what was happening until it was too late. 

Lance was nearly praying that he'd escape by himself. It could risk splitting them up more, if Lance went after a ship Keith wasn't on anymore. But whatever. If there was any chance he could make himself safe, Lance wanted him to take it.

He wasn’t entirely sure about how heroic his actions over the past few hours had been. He wasn’t even sure he cared. When the Ventri translator had finally revealed the destination of the Thothith ship (eight quadrants away) and the course planned for it, Lance had tried to walk away. He would have been able to, even if it wasn’t the smart move. He would have taken the high road.

But it had laughed, again, that disturbing, skin-crawling sound that sparked intense anger in Lance’s gut. It had spoken only to goad him.

‘The human is weak.’ Lance had lifted the gun threateningly, responding to the slight with a sneer. It had continued. ‘The human will perish in the darkness, as dozens have before it.’

Lance wasn’t all that proud of what he’d done next.

But he didn’t regret it.

 

He wasn’t sure this was… normal.

Lance had worried about losing the other Paladins before. When they'd all been split up by the wormholes, when Keith and Shiro had been trapped by the Blades of Marmora, when he'd lost Hunk as long ago as searching for their lions. When Shiro had vanished from the Black Lion had been especially difficult, particularly because it drove Keith's volatility to new heights.

But all the time he'd suspected they'd keep it together.

He'd never been so worried that he could barely breathe before. Never been so worried that it made his hands shake. Never been so scared that he couldn't stop thinking of Keith struggling to breathe, fighting, trapped and alone...

He wondered if he was weak from fatigue.

He managed to steal a few bits and pieces of food, mostly unappealing, all unidentifiable, and some water, but he was starting to think it might have been a mistake, because it looked like the sun was going down. Shit.

He’d snuck into the shipyard on the coattails of some kind of strange slinking lizard thing (not literally of course… it wasn’t really wearing a coat… or clothes… maybe Lance shouldn’t have walked so close). The problem now was trying to find a ship he could actually pilot, one without an audience or passengers. Preferably one which wasn’t the size of a small planet in the Thothith rearview mirror.

_I miss Blue._

_I miss Keith._

Christ. Maybe he was getting heatstroke.

He tried driving away the owners of a falcon winged craft piloted by vague humanoids with long necks, but as soon as he was nestled in the cockpit he discovered it was a racer. Lance needed a ship which could jump. Even a ship which could bunny-hop would be enough.

He stumbled back out into the fading light, rubbing fatigue from his eyes. The gut ache of anxiety was exhausting. He tried to reason it away… he was doing everything he could. He was certain the rest of the team would be doing the same as soon as they realised Keith and Lance were out of comm-range. _Dios_ , Keith. No. Thinking about him just made the ache worse.

He tried to reassure himself that, _hey, it was Keith, Keith wasn’t even that likeable_ … but that made it much worse. Like, paralysing stomach cramps level of worse.

His focus was starting to turn to a haze when he stumbled around the landing gear of a Sheeveenee spacecraft and laid eyes on the egg shaped ship gently burrowed in the sand a couple hundred metres away. It was intuition rather than logic that convinced Lance that this was what he was looking for. It was almost amusing, akin to the shape of rockets children played with, with four rotating boosters on the rear and a spinning drill tip for carving a vortex through space-time.

It was stunning.

Unfortunately, Lance was clearly not the only person to think so. He didn’t have time to be diplomatic, and he had to make several leg and shoulder shots (roughly, alien anatomy was always a surprise when you least expected it) in order to dissuade the occupants from trying to stop him. _Visiting a slave trading outpost_ , he told himself, _must be bad aliens… must be bad aliens… please let them be bad aliens_.

The ship was fairly small, probably only big enough for a team of less than a dozen. It didn’t seem like a military ship, lacking weapons and armour. He wasn’t entirely sure what its purpose was… exploration? Scientific discovery? Like the Kerberos ship, but that was still no explanation of why they’d landed here.

Lance mashed the propulsion and threw the weight of the ship forward. He couldn’t risk lingering long enough for the Ventri to be alerted to the theft of a ship. Lifting unsteadily into the atmosphere, feeling the ship start to rock as it picked up speed through the into orbit, Lance wished he’d remembered the tractor beam which had dragged them down into this mess in the first place. He just crossed his fingers and hoped the ship was fast enough to evade it.

 

 

 

Keith had lost track of how long it had been. His arms had stopped bleeding, but remained damp and sticky. A few of the more recent rats had opened some deeper cuts. One had ripped into his left hand, leaving the knuckles bloody and raw. It was almost a relief, being unable to see how bad it was. It helped Keith ignore the pain.

Another had gotten close enough to launch itself at his face. He’d ducked, and tried to deflect it, but claws had tangled in his hair and lacerated his scalp before he’d managed to throw the damn thing off.

He thought there was blood on his face, but at this point he had no idea if it was his or not.

Movement was getting more difficult. Between the pain and the blood and the difficulty breathing, he felt pretty exhausted, although he wasn’t keen to admit it, with the sound of more rodents in the distance. There was no break in the progress of the vent. At one point he’d taken a left turn instead of a right turn, but as yet, no sign of an exit.

He was hungry as well as thirsty, familiar sensations to which he’d become acclimatised in the desert. Keith was grimly aware that he wasn’t exceptional at self-management. Long periods without food, water, and/or sleep had become commonplace, before Shiro had returned and the routine enforced by Allura had corrected most of his erratic behaviour.

At the very least, it meant he could endure this for a time. He was well-versed in the art of avoidance, and nothing was a better distraction than stabbing and maiming alien rodents which were trying to kill you.

Keith made it a few more metres forward before hesitating. He thought he could hear something in the distance, but the vents played tricks with sound. There was a cross-vent up ahead, and he was learning to be cautious about those. The rats had enough instincts to attack from behind given the chance, and Keith wasn’t willing to risk underestimating them.

He surmised that the rat making noise had popped out of one of the junctions he’d already passed, and if the return of silence was anything to go by, it had taken the other direction.

He crawled onwards, despite the fabric over his shoulders weakening and gently shredding under the constant, harsh contact with the insides of the vents. His knees and shins were going the same way, but he knew the suit was already compromised by the rips in his sleeves.

He was within reach of the junction, readying the knife in case something sprang out at him, but he knew as soon as he heard the flurry of movement up ahead that he’d made the wrong call. It wasn’t like backtracking was easy, but… shit.

Something launched itself towards his head, materialising as a grey blur out of the dark as he stabbed upwards, but instantly there were teeth stabbing through the suit at his ribs. He cursed, the sound of his own rough breathing lending itself to the suffocating alarm suffusing his body. He’d grazed the one up front, but had to twist to dislodge the one on the left. Something latched on to the back of one of his ankles above his boot, and he kicked instinctively, but when he felt claws pierce the suit over his shoulder blade and tiny knives biting into the flesh at the join of his neck and shoulders, he relinquished a long-suppressed cry of pain.

It took a few attempts to stab through the haunches of the damn rodent mauling his ribs, and the softer, vulnerable skin between them and his hip, and then he turned his attention to the thing scraping grooves across his spine and taking chunks out of his neck.

It evaded the dripping blade of the knife, scrabbling across his back and sinking spikes into the back of his thigh.

Keith spat another curse, feeling panic loosen his grip on his reactions. He tried flailing back with the knife, but his injured hand hit the vent wall and he whimpered. Hot anger was crawling up his spine, but his eyes were starting to feel swollen and his movements were dragging like there were weights attached to his limbs. He needed to get the other two off him before his strength was gone.

He scooted forward, tucking his head and shoulders into one branch of the tunnel and pulling his body into a tight curve so he could cleave a blow down onto the head of the rat shredding his ankle into strips. The last one was more conniving. It moved when he moved, dancing around the blade as it sang in arcs over Keith’s body. He felt dizzy and weak, and he took the opportunity that occurred to him, grabbing at the rat as it snapped its jaw around his knee in a passing bite. It writhed and bit his hand, but Keith managed to hold it long enough to drive the knife through its skull, feeling the tip of the blade nick the skin under his thumb as it breached the surface of the rat’s head.

He shoved the rat off him with the last remnants of his strength, and dragged himself down the passage with his forearms. He’d gotten turned around in the fight, and he didn’t know which vent he’d ended up in, but it was too late to care. He couldn’t identify much beyond the sting of fresh wounds and the burning throb of older ones.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all for your support (especially you and you, who provided much needed reassurance about shoulder width).   
> I s2g Keith is my favourite character, and a precious baby who should never be harmed...


	7. Got that imminent death feeling...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I really want to thank everyone for being super supportive, and I'm gonna be super lame and answer all your messages individually because I'm too excited! Also, for my favourite penguin girl, lots of love for when you get here. So far so good?

Keith was starting to feel his clarity slipping away. He was panting, so far unable to recover a full lungful of air. One second he was too cold, the next he was too hot, and he hoped it was sweat dripping off his forehead and not blood, although it could have been a combination at this point.

The hunger had dissipated, at least, probably due to increasing nausea, but he was incredibly thirsty. His head was aching again.

There were undoubtedly more rats headed towards him, but he was too weak to fight off the waves of exhaustion crashing over him. He let his forehead drop against the floor, folded his arms over his hair protectively, and pulled his legs as close as possible within the confines of the vent.

The metal was gloriously cool… since when had he been burning up like this? The darkness spun and swirled into imagined colours. Keith suppressed the reflex to throw up, and wondered how long it had been since he’d been outside. Even the throbbing headache and bullying of the slavers’ planet was less pointlessly frustrating than this. Even the transit stuck in a two person Altean pod with Lance had a certain appeal in hindsight.

‘Nice, Keith. Very flattering.’

An unmistakeable voice floated through the vent, and Keith forced himself to lift his head, eyes watering from the effort. He wasn’t wrong. Lance was right there, a few feet in front of him. Spotlighted despite the black bodysuit, like he carried his own damn stage lights around with him. Keith can practically see the blue of his eyes. He was lying on his stomach, chin resting on steepled fingers, and his legs half-lifted and entwined behind him like he was a teenage girl reading a magazine. Keith would have rolled his eyes if he hadn’t been so ridiculously relieved to see him. Or if rolling his eyes didn’t make his head hurt more than it already did.

‘Lance?’ The sound of his own voice startled him. He sounded like an old man. Or a dying man.

‘I knew not to trust your interior decorating instincts, buddy, but this is pretty depressing, even for you. I mean, if you were going for Bat-Cave, I think you’re kind of missing the payoff features.’

Keith was trying to form a sensible response and failing, when a rush of sanity hit him like cold water.

Impossible… of course. Lance hadn’t even been on the same ship, let alone been put into the vents with him. He wouldn’t have fit, anyway.

Lance snorted, and it was so spot on Keith wanted to punch himself in the face.

‘Hey, don’t blame me for your own twisted subconscious.’ The hallucination said smugly, and Keith responded with a groan.

‘I reserve the right to hate my own brain.’

There was nothing but laughter.

‘Why you, anyway? Last time my brain tried to fuck with me I got Shiro.’ And his Dad, but that… was part of the Galra test. He hoped.

‘You might trust Shiro’s judgement more than mine, but…’ Lance dropped his voice to a stage whisper. ‘…I’m the one you want to see right now.’

‘I’d settle for anything which wasn’t trying to gnaw my face off.’

Not-Lance laughed slowly, until the sound faded into silence, taking the glowing image of the Blue Paladin with it. Keith could only hear his own rough, rapid breathing, and the sound of sweat dripping off his nose and chin onto the metal. He wondered if Lance was gone, and it troubled him.

‘You’re not going to ask why?’ Lance’s mock disappointment echoed out of the darkness.

 _I already did_ , Keith thought. Dazedly, he wondered if he was speaking aloud, or thinking, or if he was even awake at all.

‘You didn’t ask why you wanted to see me.’ Lance corrected gleefully. ’Know why? Because you already have the answer. Or I do… but I’m you. And I’m also me, because you’re you.’

The urge to vomit struck Keith hard. He clenched his jaw and fought the reflex desperately, nausea rising from his stomach to his brain until everything was spinning.

That didn’t feel like a dream. But Lance continued talking, impervious to Keith’s distress.

‘Because you want my attention.’

‘Because if Shiro was here, he’d tell you what you should be doing. Be better, try harder, have hope. The whole heroic box set.’

‘Because I care more about what you’re actually doing.’ Lance’s voice was unnervingly clear. Keith couldn’t tell if he wanted him to continue or not, serving for the moment as the only distraction from his imminent physical shutdown. ‘Because we have an emotional connection-’

Keith mustered a derisive snort. This could not be his brain talking.

Lance talked louder, more insistently. ‘Other people might notice you, even… even admire you. Expect great things from you. But I’m the one who cares.’

Keith dropped his head back to the floor. Dammit.

‘I don’t-’ He gasped, realising sharply that he was too out of breath to finish the sentence. _Know that._

‘You believe it.’ Lance chided cheerfully. ‘You believe I’ll-’

Fresh pain burst through his consciousness from the back of his leg, and Keith jerked. Instinct was enough to stop him flailing into either wall or the ceiling, and he’d managed to curl up tightly enough to bury the knife in the side of the rat with one swing of his left arm. It didn’t stop every previous injury from sending flares of pain straight to his brain.

He was lucky that he killed it with the first blow. His left hand was slightly more usable than his right, still holding his neck together and slippery with blood, but that swing had drained the remnants of his energy. He curled back up, and waited for Lance to reappear.

 

 

Keith wasn’t sure how long he’d been unconscious. The wounds had stopped bleeding, but were all sending pulses of pain through his body in symphony. He must have passed out shortly after that last rat had jumped him.

‘Lance?’ He asked, sounding weaker than he expected. The word whispered along the dark tunnel and bounced back at him softly. No more hallucinations, then. Instead, a sinking feeling of disappointment.

He tried to keep moving, but progress had gone from difficult to imperceptibly slow. His limbs felt leaden and heavy, and he still felt unbearably hot.

He didn’t think anything had gotten to him while he was unconscious, but it was hard to tell. The vents were silent now, which he was inclined to interpret as suspicious rather than fortuitous, although it was beneficial in his current state.

The drag in his muscles, the pain triggered by every sluggish motion, the loss of clear thought… He was reaching his limit. This wasn’t as bad as the Blade trials. Not yet, anyway. Those guys were seriously committed to the bit. He supposed, in a way, that was what made it seem right, necessary, to him. Dedication and endurance were points of pride to his family… or at least, they had been. He’d thought that finding the origins of his knife (clutched in one bleeding hand at this moment) would be a chance to prove that he held those traits. He’d almost failed, but the mission to defeat Zarkon evoked the same intensity, the drive to persist, no matter what happened.

And yet, here he was, potentially about to perish in the ventilation system of some unknown alien species, at the hands - or rather, claws - of what basically amounted to oversized rats. How spectacularly anticlimactic. And not really up there in the heroism stakes, either.

With his luck, Lance would carry on to defeat the rest of the Galra empire and restore relative harmony to the universe before his demise.

Honestly, with any luck, Lance would be able to just go home to his family and pass away in peace in his old age. Keith wouldn’t wish that away from anyone.

He kept himself occupied with the idea for a while, toying with the outcome of their mission. He hadn’t thought much beyond it from his own perspective… there wasn’t anything to return to. Ideally, Pidge would find her father and brother and take them home, where all three would be hailed as geniuses and heroes. Hunk would return as master of both alien engineering and cuisine. Allura would restore the legacy of the Altean empire… although perhaps only in historical terms. Shiro might remain in space, having discovered a higher calling than teaching the cadets of a sub-rate species how to fly barely functional spacecraft around a tiny galaxy.

Lance would go back to his family. He’d be one of the best pilots the Garrison would ever lay eyes on. He’d guide humanity towards a new horizon in space exploration. He’d probably sideline as a part-time saver of worlds, because he couldn’t keep his nose out of the business of other planets. Maybe he would end up having his pick of the beautiful women he encountered, when they learned to recognise the valour under the noise.

A sharp spasm of pain interrupted Keith’s daydream, making him grunt. His stomach was cramping, sending shockwaves out through his other muscles like ripples from a pebble dropped in a lake. Now his back muscles were seizing, then his neck and his biceps and his legs and forearms down to his fingertips.

He was too busy trying to drag in air and combat the thick fog flooding his brain to really wonder what was happening. The only thought he registered was the dull realisation that nobody was left to miss him when he didn’t go home. He probably wouldn’t be found, smuggled off into deep space aboard a random ship as a random prisoner. When they landed they’d flush his body out with the rats’ and drop them in some hole somewhere. There’d be nothing left to mourn, and even the Red Lion would have to move on once the psychic connection was so wholly severed.

Thankfully, that was when he passed out.

 

 

The vent was different. At least, it was different to his fuzzy recollection from before he’d passed out. For starters, there were shafts of light cleaving across the gloom, still faint, but in relative terms as bright as starlight. The abominable pressure on his shoulders was gone, which would have left him free to sit up if he’d had the strength.

The air stank, though, of rotten food and faeces, an inglorious torture Keith hadn’t previously been forced to endure. He lifted an arm to cover his nose and mouth, finding it wet and sticky and barely even covered by the suit. He could see some of the gashes in the dim light, but mostly just the thick oozing coat of blood, on everything from his elbow to his fingernails.

Something started up a shrill squeaking noise around him, and sheer instinct forced him onto his hands and knees. The knife was dangling loosely from his other hand. It was perhaps a blessing he hadn’t lost it, as within moments he felt needles stabbing into him from every direction. His wrists, then arms, thighs, the backs of his knees and his calf muscles. He was surrounded by them, shrieking, squealing furless rats, each about the size of a rockmelon with huge glazed orbs for eyeballs.

 _A nest_.

The goddamn rats must have thought he was well and truly dead to drag him in here. But then, his thinking had followed similar lines, so what right did he have to judge?

They were less rabid than the big ones, but there were dozens of them, crawling and climbing over one another to reach edible meat. He would have felt more reluctance to kill the babes if they hadn’t already opened most of his old wounds and begun efficiently gouging out new ones. He tried to stab and toss them off one at a time and gave up after two, opting to hack through the writhing little bodies in swathes until he’d cleared enough space to drag himself limply to one wall of the nest. They followed blindly, probably by the scent of blood, and he swiped at them feebly.

The light was spilling in from dents in the metal, chunks peeled back where the fastening studs had fallen or been scratched out. Keith elbowed the plate behind him, unsurprised by the pain that bloomed up his arm and the complete lack of movement from the metal. It was solid, whatever it was, in spite of the bent section in the corner.

He kicked at the rats, sticking the blade of the knife into the gap and pushing to try and lever it open. It wasn’t going to be enough. There was a weaker plate a few feet away, on the other side of the nest. He’d have to finish off the rest of them to get over there, but he didn’t have much choice. He needed to get out of the vents before the full-grown ones came back to discover what he’d done.

It took longer than he was hoping it would to get through the last of them and drag himself back, and Christ knows what he was getting all over himself in the process. This plate was at least mostly peeled down at the top.

He shoved the knife in and pushed, and felt a flood of relief as the metal yielded, popping out at the centre and bottom on the left. It was risky to leave his back exposed, but he had to turn in order to kick it out fully.

The bottom right corner wouldn’t release, and he had to scrape through the gap, toppling out into the metal frame of the ceiling substructure. There were wires bound round the bars, tangled in between in bundles and hammocks. Keith could only think of avoiding the rats. He used the frame to clamber higher, groaning as everything ached, until he found a crossbar to curl up on.

Dropping down could mean a way out of the ceiling. He could see the lights of the corridor below through narrow holes in the grates, but they looked secure, too solid to break through in one attempt, and he would have fallen anyway.

He could still fall, given the dizziness and the hazy confusion and the precarious position he was in.

 

 

'Don't let me interrupt your nap.' Lance’s all-too-cheery voice drifted out of the darkness. Keith couldn’t even lift his head to see if his mind had conjured a proper image of him. He groaned instead.

'You’re… not ev’n… here.'

‘Excellent deductive skills, Kogane. You’re so special, aren’t you?’

Lance laughed. Blood dribbled through Keith’s fingertips from his stomach.

‘I’m… I’m so… so special.’ So tremendously special he could barely speak, even to a figment of his own imagination.

‘Did you miss me? Wait, don’t answer. I already know. “Yes Lance. Missed you so much Lance. Xoxo Lance.” Or at least, if you weren’t so emotionally constipated.’ 

‘What… d’you… want?’

‘Couples therapy.’ Lance chortled. ‘If we don’t talk about our problems, we won’t be able to fix them.’

‘La…nce.’ It was hard to sound menacing when you were curled up in the foetal position bleeding to death. Keith hoped the “I will stab you, if I have to stab myself to do it” was implied.

‘Just admit it. It’ll be a lot easier. On both of us. Or, you, mostly. Not me, who, in case you’ve forgotten, you abandoned in a desert.’

Keith’s grip slipped from the bar he was holding, and his arm dangled uselessly into space. He was starting to feel… numb. 

‘I’m…’ His breath ran out, he tried to inhale. ’… sorry.’

‘So this is about guilt?’ Even Lance sounded mildly surprised. 

Keith closed his eyes, let the fatigue carry his thoughts into clouds.

He shouldn't have lost Lance in the desert. God, he should have just let him pilot the Blue Lion, and then they wouldn't be separated and God knows he only did it to spite Lance... The Red Lion might have been a faster option, but he knew the Blue Lion and her Paladin were perfectly capable in a crisis. More reliable, even, because Lance was slightly less prone to veering off on impulsive tangents (unless there was someone attractive involved). And Lance was loyal, so unfalteringly loyal.

'What happened was your fault...' Lance said, tone filled with sardonic awe. 'Who saw that coming? Planning on ignoring that little fact, were you? It's just like you to undermine me at every turn.'

Keith's mind had slipped from awareness all too readily. He couldn't fathom his circumstances, and he would have had trouble answering simple questions, but he was focused on Lance's voice like a guide light.

It was easier to speak now, but he wasn’t sure he was awake anymore... He wasn’t sure of anything. 

'I'm sorry, Lance.' He blinked, trying to dislodge the confusion engulfing this conversation. 'I didn't mean to upset you.'

He never had, and that was the truth. From the minute Lance had appeared out in the desert on Earth, ranting some stuff about Garrison feuds and vendettas even while helping him rescue Shiro, Keith had been uncertain of just how he'd managed to piss him off so mightily.

‘You didn’t mind, though.’ Lance continued scathingly. ‘Must be kind of a nice ego boost, having someone so obsessed with you.’

‘That wasn’t…’ Keith searched for an answer, an explanation. He wasn’t certain himself. It was a pain putting up with Lance, but yeah, the attention had been kind of gratifying, after so long without so much as a friendly conversation. 

Having Shiro back, having a mission, it would have been enough. It would have been good. It was in his nature to follow a task to its resolution, and Shiro was practically like a brother.

But having someone who seemed to see everything he did as a challenge, as something outlandishly aggravatingly _interesting_ … That had been… satisfying. Even if he had no idea what motivated it.

‘I don’t know _why_ … you hate me.’ Keith countered, letting pent-up frustration colour his tone. ‘What did you expect from me?I don’t know what I did wrong, and you never leave it alone… so yeah, I think it’s funny sometimes when you get pissed off. It’s your fault for being an asshole.’

Lance laughed shrilly. Keith can practically see him, sitting on one of the couches in the Castle, while Keith stayed on the floor with his eyes closed. It _wasn’t_ Keith’s fault Lance was competitive. So _maybe_ he was a bit reckless sometimes, sailed a bit close to the wind when he was piloting or in combat, but if Lance was going to get all antsy about it that was his problem.

And if Lance chose to come steaming up to him afterwards to pick a fight, surely Keith had a right to feel smug. Even pleased. He wasn’t _trying_ to annoy him. Was he?

The floor was uncomfortable. Keith was starting to wonder why he was lying there in the first place, but he seemed to have lost the will to move. And he was too tired and thirsty to argue with Lance right now. Really, he just wanted to listen to him talk.

‘Do you have any water?’

‘No. I’m in a desert, remember?’ Lance laughed again, but his amusement seemed genuine.

 _A desert?_ ‘I’m coming back-’ _Why was Lance in a desert, again?_

‘As a corpse? You giving up on me, Keith?’

‘No-’ He _never_ gave up.

‘So you're just assuming whatever is happening to me can wait? If I'm bleeding out somewhere waiting for your help, or being tortured at the hands of the Galra, it's okay because you need a breather from fighting vent rats?’

‘Lance-’ 

‘You're supposed to be stronger than that, Keith.’ He felt like he was falling into a hole, like that dizzy moment just before you fall asleep when you’re too exhausted to keep your eyes open. He felt like the edges of his mind were contracting and smothering everything in darkness. ‘You’re supposed to care about me too.’ 

Keith didn’t want to argue anymore. He wanted to sleep. And he wanted Lance to not be mad, at least, not right now. Not for a little while. Even if it meant he had to surrender control for a little while.

‘I do.’

After that, everything faded to nothing.


	8. It's a bird! It's a plane! It's... me, jumping off that building over there.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Two things rn. 
> 
> 1\. The bodysuits seem to have gloves built in... which I did not think about until after I wrote about gloves.  
> 2\. I'm gonna need therapy after this. Not because it's that intense, merely because using my brain is painful.
> 
> This is a long one. I realise things have been moving slowly, hopefully this is a bit (???) better. I don't know at this point. See No. 2 above.

Lance kept jumping to coordinate points along the course the Thothith were supposed to be following, but he couldn’t find a damn thing. Every successive jump and failure chipped away at his resolve, eroding his faith that he’d catch up and get Keith out of there.

He’d been travelling long enough to wonder if his time was up. He’d fallen asleep and toppled off the “inappropriate for humans” pilot’s seat at least three times while flying between jumps to let the generators recharge (mostly guesswork: he wasn’t entirely sure how this thing worked). He’d even eaten half the food he’d stolen, just to stave off hunger pangs and fatigue. He’d spent long stretches talking, just in the hopes that his helmet comms would reconnect, or maybe that Pidge was somehow scanning for him over radio frequencies (or whatever she did to make her magic). He’d stared at the navigation panel so much it was burned onto the backs of his eyelids.

He swore over and over that he’d do anything to get Keith back. Fight the Galra empire single-handed? Done. Sacrifice his unbelievable good looks? Done. Completely corrupt his own moral compass? Already there!

Compared with spending the rest of his days knowing he missed his chance to drag the scrappy Red Paladin’s ass out of danger in time? No question which he’d choose.

Realistically speaking, Lance had a… hate/hate relationship with Keith. But they were like family. And, for Lance at least, Red was essential. Keith was basically the reason he hadn’t thrown in the towel and curled up in the foetal position on his bunk, sobbing uncontrollably. He just couldn’t let Keith get all the glory. It was a compulsion.

He still remembered the first day they’d spoken with long-familiar resentment. For weeks Lance had known Keith by sight and reputation, and the tug of naive admiration he’d felt every time he’d seen him. Keith Kogane, the best student pilot the Garrison had ever seen, and one of the most promising combatants the Garrison ever trained. He was fearless, and he had the talent to back it up.

Then Lance had worked up the nerve to approach him, and the whole conversation had been two sentences of complete disinterest and disdain. It stung. It still stung. Later, Lance had learned that basically that was just Keith. Everybody knew it. Best prized from afar, but not exactly beloved, or even… liked.

Keith in space was Keith on Earth, but much, much closer up. Impractical levels of focus and intensity, reckless and impulsive behaviour, and a reflexive quirk of self-absorption.

Unfortunately for Lance’s long-harboured grudge, Keith was also occasionally contemplative, dry and quick-witted, and downright cute. Despite his best efforts, Lance hadn’t been able to sponge from his brain the memory of Keith grasping his hand in the aftermath of Sendak’s attack, and the startling warmth of his concern, infecting Lance like a fever.

Since then, Lance had been pushing to keep Keith at a safe distance with increasing desperation. This, however… This was not a safe distance. This was a horrible, unbearable unacceptable torture.

The vortex fluctuated and ejected Lance into space, and for a single moment he stared uncomprehendingly at the immense, grey-black mass in front of him.

 

 

The Thothith ship was gathering speed for its own hyperspace jump. Lance didn’t know what mechanism the Thothith used. He knew for certain that the ship he was in didn’t operate like the Castle, but the Thothith ship might, or might be different from both. He was a pilot, not an engineer, after all… this was all kind of… baffling.

He couldn’t pick up the pace on his ship’s generator recharge, so he just threw the thrusters on full blast and hurtled at top speed towards the bulk of the other ship.

Despite the curious shape and size of his commandeered craft, it sped up fairly quickly. Lance snapped every control he could and threw himself out of the pilot’s seat, cramming everything back into the bag he’d stolen, securing it around his shoulders and under his arm where it wouldn’t interfere with the jetpack. It was heavy, and inconvenient, but he wasn’t relinquishing Keith’s armour. He kept his eyes on the ship as he began to sail past, even as his ship started to wail in distress at the approach of a hyperspace anomaly. He wasn’t sure he’d be able to recognise or even find what he was looking for, until he saw it.

He checked the bag one last time, hoped his jetpack hadn’t been damaged in the desert, and twisted the bearing of his spacecraft into the side of the Thothith ship at full speed.

He barely bailed out of the ship in time. The bag slowed his escape, and he had to fire the jetpack pretty hard without a warm-up in order to avoid getting obliterated by the shrapnel splintering off the shell as it collided with the Thothith monstrosity, hardly leaving a dent.

His aim hadn’t been perfect and he’d crashed a lot lower than he’d hoped, but he used the jetpack to make it the rest of the way to the signal light, placidly blinking to mark the exterior of the airlock.

Relief and glee accompanied his discovery that it had external emergency access, without so much as a keycode. It was just a big button behind a metal grate controlled by a huge lever.

Lance had to brace himself against the side of the ship to build enough force to move the lever, but the button was a piece of cake. The airlock must have been decompressed before the door edged upwards, because Lance climbed across without a rush of air trying to rip his grip loose and throw him into space.

He crawled inside, clinging to the walls, and slammed the hatch closed.

 _Thank God_. Now all he had to do was find Keith, or make sure he’d made it out okay, and everything would be fine.

 

 

He already knew he was looking for the ventilation system, but in a ship this size searching all of it would be nigh on impossible, let alone too slow for his timeframe. He hiked the bag onto his back and scoured the section of the ship he’d entered. There were no sentries or guard posts. The corridors were wide enough for buses and unsealed. Clearly this wasn’t any kind of military operation.

This section seemed to be a cargo area of some sort, but it didn’t take too long for Lance to locate console access to the ship’s mainframe.

It wasn’t as advanced as Galra tech, and not even close to the Castle or the Lions, but at this moment that was ideal. The systems seemed to be designed for efficiency and practicality. There were no security codes, no breach sensors. A two year old could have searched the whole ship.

It still took time and mostly luck for Lance, crouched behind the whiteboard sized console, to stumble through cargo-relevant databases and general operational outlays. He found the ventilation system control - mostly the operation of hatch seals in case of a hull breach - and embarked upon an intensive scan of the programs. The Thothith language was akin to Morse code, a curious combination of lines and dots, but Lance didn’t have the time to try and determine if the similarity made the language meaningful.

He poked and prodded and scrolled through screens of maps and what might have been instructions, incident reports, or even just diary entries. The extent of the task in front of him was starting to seem… overwhelming. If there was nothing in the ventilation controls about prisoners, it could be somewhere else - in operations, in cargo, in maintenance - and Lance had no way of telling what he was _actually_ looking at.

Frustration made him slam his fist into the console, wishing he had some problem he could solve with straight-up violence.

‘Dammit, Red.’ He thumped a few more buttons. ‘Where are you?’

_Okay. Stay calm. You just need to find him._

Why’d he think this would be straightforward? He couldn’t understand the language, he didn’t know where to look.

There was a noise from the corridor, and Lance activated his bayard, prepared to vent his frustration on an enemy combatant. It was incredible that one of the resident aliens - A Thothith? Thothian? Thothithian? - had managed to reach the entrance to the room without him hearing it. It was bigger than Lance remembered them being, about the size of a hatchback, with a head like a scaly walrus.

He lifted up the rifle and shouted, apparently startling it.

‘Stop! Hold it right there!’ There was more nerve in his voice than he liked. He put it down to the fact that he _didn’t have time for this_.

It lumbered to a halt with mild confusion, and Lance saw his chance.

‘Where are your prisoners? How do I find them?’

The Thothithian continued to stare at him blankly, obviously aware that he was armed but completely unable to understand him.

‘My copilot. My-’ He lifted one hand and pulled his helmet off. ‘My kind. I want to find him.’

Something which might have been recognition dawned on the unfamiliar features of the alien. It moved closer slowly, and Lance backed up, giving it enough room to see him without losing his safe distance. With increasing excitement, it pointed at his bare head with a three fingered hand, and then pointed straight up.

Lance hesitated, glanced upwards, and prayed that it meant what he wanted it to mean. Keith. On a different level of the ship.

‘How do I find him?’ He repeated, and mimed with his free hand. “I” “Walking” “See” “Up”.

The Thothithian grunted agreement, but didn’t move. Instead, it turned somewhat calmly to the console and tapped through a few options, before pointing at the screen enthusiastically. Lance edged closer. It seemed to be a map of the ship, but three-dimensional, unlike the blueprints he’d located before. There was a blinking red dot buried within the network of rooms and pathways and structures.

Over-excited, Lance stabbed at the dot with his finger. ‘That’s him? Where are the others?’ He wasn’t sure he wanted to know the answer.

The Thothithian shot him a look, and Lance held up three fingers. It responded by lifting its own three fingers (two fingers, one thumb, Lance observed), and folding two down, pulling back its lips and baring its teeth.

Lance wasn’t sure, but he thinks that might mean death.

 

Whatever else the Thothith might be (kidnappers, murderers, assholes), one-on-one they were actually pretty reasonable, if not incredibly bright. Lance’s new friend seemed perfectly cheerful about leading him to the location of the dot on the map. Lance had replaced his helmet, quickly finding himself troubled by the quality of the air - it wasn’t thin, exactly, just not very satisfying - and kept his bayard at the ready. They passed several other Thothithians who barely bat an eyelid (to be fair, Lance wasn’t sure if they actually had eyelids) at Lance’s presence, in spite of the gun and the armour and the general lack of explanation for him being there.

It was infuriating. Lance had been building plans in his head of how much damage he was going to do to this ship, to these… _beings_ , but the Thothith were clearly non-hostile, if generally…inconsiderate.

Lance wouldn’t have had any way of knowing if he was being led into a trap until it was too late, but the idea of betraying him apparently hadn’t occurred to his companion. An elevator ride and miles of indistinguishable spaceship later, and they were both standing in the middle of an empty corridor, peering up at the ceiling. Lance had let the bayard swing by his side, wondering if he could use the jetpack to get up there. Even if he did, he had no way of getting beyond the slabs of metal grate between him and the ventilation shaft. The Thothithian seemed unperturbed by this problem, and hastily stretched upwards to its full height (a terrifying sight), prising the slabs apart with a surprisingly nimble grip.

Lance felt his heart rate pick up. Plenty of fears had occurred to him between the cargo hold and here. This could be the wrong prisoner. Two were already missing… Keith could be… gone. Maybe what the Thothithian had meant was that he’d made it out… but then it wouldn’t have bothered to lead Lance here, would it?

Maybe they kept track of which dot was which, and this was definitely Keith, but how come it knew he wouldn’t move in the time it took them to get here? What did _that_ mean?

And how come it was so ready to lead him to Keith? Maybe this was a trap, and Lance was about to end up stuck in the vents himself?

Or maybe the Thothithian would pull Keith out of the ceiling and Lance would start crying and humiliate himself all over again.

That might still be the least painful option.

There was practically a scaffold in the ceiling space, a mass of crossed bars and wires. Lance couldn’t see much, but he thought Keith might be okay, doing his ninja-thing through that mess. As long as the air quality hadn’t hurt him.

The Thothithian dispelled his hopefulness by gesturing toward a box shaped tunnel buried in amongst the mess. _Christ, that was small_. Even Keith wouldn’t fit in that.

Swallowing, Lance let the Thothithian help him climb up. Even if it replaced the slab, Lance would prefer getting trapped to not doing anything. Plus he still had his weapon, so he could easily shoot his way out.

Getting into the vent was significantly harder than he expected. The sides were just more metal plates welded and drilled together, but the metal was dense and the edges were fixed solid. Lance was curious as to how this ventilated anything.

He considered shooting it, but quickly dismissed the idea. That really only left one good option.

He pulled out Keith’s bayard and shook it like a broken remote.

‘C’mon Red,’ He whispered desperately ‘Gimme a hand here.’

He didn’t have the force of Voltron’s psychic link behind him. He didn’t even have Keith’s stupid fingerless gloves to try and trick the damn thing, but before he’d even judged how ridiculously bad this idea was, there was a harsh noise from nearby and he dropped it in favour of whipping up the rifle.

He could barely follow the shape of the tunnel in the darkness, but up ahead it seemed to join a large cube, heavily dented, probably a better entry point than Lance’s chosen section, and emitting a muffled high pitched screech which was somewhat reminiscent of the screams of the damned.

He registered barely consciously that Keith wouldn’t be capable of making a noise like that… but he didn’t want to meet what could.

Still wary of firing the rifle in such a confined space, Lance pulled out the red bayard and shook it again, to no avail. Whatever. He’d shoot if he needed to. He just really didn’t want to risk catching Keith in the crossfire.

Edging further into the darkness, Lance hardly expected the fur and teeth that came flying towards him.

He swung with his right hand reflexively, and actual shock seared through him as the red blade materialised, striking the attacking monster with enough force to fling it sideways into one of the metal braces. Lance watched it fall onto the grate below, and glanced at the sword in his hand with awe.

He genuinely did not expect that to work. He still wasn’t sure it had. He could feel energy humming through his glove, like the bayard was trying to tell him something… maybe that there was still danger nearby… or maybe… maybe that its Paladin was close. He lifted his hand up to inspect it and felt the crackle of power intensify. Instinct guided him to look up.

He wouldn’t have recognised the pale shape hanging above his head if he didn’t already have a intuitive sense of what it was.

Yes, there was a hand. The arm disappeared into the darkness with the shade of the body suit.

‘Keith? Keith!?’ The blade in his hand vanished, and he shoved it back into his bag, climbing through the crossbars until he was perched unsteadily over Keith.

It was impossible to see him properly, but Lance didn’t hesitate before wrapping arms around him.

A few metres away and below them, the Thothithian made a loud noise of interest, probably noting the toppling body of the creature Lance had killed.

Lance called back, carefully pulling Keith over his shoulder.

He was heavy. Lance couldn’t imagine he’d exactly been eating healthily for the last couple of days, but he still weighed a ton. He was cursing by the time the Thothithian could reach up and help him down. It seemed pleased that Lance had recovered his friend, and gently delivered them both onto the corridor floor.

 

 

By the time Lance had laid Keith on his back, he was moving, and Lance was fighting to maintain some semblance of self-restraint. The Thothithian had helped him, for sure, but there was fury boiling through his veins. Keith was a mess. His suit was scratched up and torn all over, stripped at the shoulders and knees, and Lance couldn’t see a part of him which wasn’t dappled or coated with blood. He couldn’t stop his hands from ghosting back and forth over Keith’s frame, over the sections at his neck and stomach which were particularly bad, over the bloodied gashes on his forehead and scalp.

He really, really wanted to hurt someone for this.

‘Keith? Can you hear me? Hey, c’mon, Red!’ He touched Keith’s cheek, hissing at the dried blood ribboned down his cheek and jaw. ‘Keith! Keith, wake up!’

Both arms came up painfully slowly, and Lance caught one wrist to stop the blade of Keith’s knife hitting him. The other arm twisted over his face.

Lance wished he could take off the helmet and gloves. He couldn’t feel enough through them to reassure him Keith was breathing, even though the other Paladin was starting to shift. He just… needed… certainty.

‘Keith!?’ He carefully lifted the other arm out of the way, cringing at the raw wounds covering Keith’s hand and wrist. Hazy dark eyes blinked rapidly at him, red-rimmed and watering.

Sharp recollection of the darkness in the ceiling prompted Lance to move closer, blocking most of the brightness from the corridor lights.

‘Lance?’ Keith scraped out weakly. ‘Are… you real?’

Lance had to suppress a cry of sheer joy.

’Look, I know I'm out of this world… but now’s probably not the best time to hit on me.’

Keith didn't seem to register the joke, but after a pause he made a small noise that was unmistakably disdainful.

Lance let himself laugh softly, mostly out of relief.

‘It’s okay, Red. We’re gonna get you fixed up.’

He needed to get him to the Castle. Whatever the worst of it was, Keith seemed to be fading. Lance was holding his cheek in one palm, watching his unfocused gaze trail sideways.

‘We need to go…’ Lance said reluctantly. He slid an arm under Keith’s back and pulled him into a sitting position, grimacing at the wheezing pain it evoked. Keith tried to lift an hand limply but couldn’t curl his fingers around Lance’s arm, and whined in distress. It was like the sinewy strength of his muscles was failing, turning him into a puppet with its strings cut. It might have been from the gouges distributed across the surface of his skin, but Lance thought it was worse than that. Maybe the toxic metal laced through his bloodstream. Maybe whatever was making him pale and damply sweaty, making his eyes watery and his injuries swollen.

He was probably too heavy to carry all the way through a search for an escape pod, which had been Lance’s plan, so he looked across at the Thothithian watching them eagerly from nearby, and mimed the flight of a ship with his hands.

It seemed to gather his meaning almost immediately, possibly assuming that was the natural next step in Lance’s plan, and straightened up to lumber off.

Lance felt Keith flinch, and tightened his grip. Admittedly, collaboration with the enemy wasn’t the most comforting move, but he was still low on options.

He fought sympathy to Keith’s whimper as he folded him over a shoulder and stood up. His own gloved hands were slightly sticky with a mixture of blood and sweat, and he was worried about the pressure this was putting on Keith’s abdomen. The faster he got him out of here the better, which meant a little bit of follow-the-leader was necessary.

 

It took nearly fifteen minutes for the Thothithian to guide Lance to an escape pod, but upon arrival it conceded to open it up for him. Lance stumbled inside, starting to ache from the neck down from the dead ( _God, no, not that_ ) weight on his shoulder. He knelt awkwardly and rolled Keith off him, alarmed to discover that he was no longer awake.

He brushed hair off Keith’s face and waited a few tics, observing the unsteady rise and fall of his chest, before standing up and turning to the giant alien in the corridor just outside the pod.

It released a low grumble of noise, raised a hand in farewell, and sealed the door closed.

The launch nearly knocked Lance off his feet, and he dropped back into a crouch, leaning over Keith protectively as the pod started to shudder out of the Thothith ship’s gravity.

He needed to go and set the trajectory, if possible, but it was too soon to leave Keith’s side, and the navigation console was really far away. This was the biggest escape pod Lance had ever been in. On the plus side, the chairs looked a lot more comfortable, even if he would have to stand on one to reach the controls.

After a brief rest he picked Keith up and carried him to one of the chairs, carefully laying him on his slightly less damaged side. He mumbled something in his sleep ( _unconsciousness?_ ) but didn’t wake up.

The pod was still moving with the momentum of the launch, but after a cursory glance Lance’s heart sank. This pod didn’t jump. It looked like it wasn’t even built to pilot, just to fly automatically to the nearest planet and send a distress signal. He dropped his head back against the chair miserably. Goddammit. He was so damn close.

He was about to take off his helmet when he realised the air was probably still lethal, and jumped off the chair to return to Keith.

There wasn’t anything he could do. The rips in Keith’s suit meant it was no longer airtight and his helmet wouldn’t be able to feed him suitable oxygen. He just had to wait a little longer, Lance thought, wait until he could find something to help or a way to locate Voltron.

He rummaged through the contents of the bag instead, trying to find anything which could work as a bandage, before giving up and climbing onto the chair next to him. Keith mumbled again as Lance pulled him into his arms. It might not have been all that considerate of his injuries, but at least Lance found it comforting.

‘Hey, Red. Red, red, sleepy-head.’ He hummed, fatigue oozing down his limbs. ‘Did you miss me?’

He moved a few blood crusted locks of hair behind Keith’s ears, and yawned.

‘Mmn… Lan…’ Keith stirred and breathed a few syllables, struggling to prise his eyes open.

Lance curled over him, too tired to even bother with the concept of personal space.

‘Keith? Are you okay?’ _Stupid question_. ‘Hang in there, the others are gonna find us.’

Keith almost managed a smile, and Lance thought his heart might break at how small he looked. Kogane wasn’t like this. Ever. He could take a full-on beating and keep on fighting, so there was no way a little bit of - well, a lot of - spring cleaning would take him down. Lance hoped. Really, really, really hoped.

Keith fidgeted again, nestling against his chest, and unfamiliarity roused his rational brain. This was… _Keith_ , he was hugging. Lance’s all-time most infuriating nemesis. For sure, that didn’t change the fact that they were teammates… and practically family… and that Lance would do _anything_ to ensure he was safe…

But he couldn’t- shouldn’t- _would not_ let his stupid brain forget that they were rivals and not… anything else. No matter how… stupid his brain wanted to be.

‘Lance…’ Keith sounded like he was carving words out of stone, it’s so much effort to talk. ‘ ’m sorry…’

’S’all good. S’all all good, Red. We’re gonna get home. And there’s gonna be so much Hunk-goop waiting for us, it’s gonna blow your mind-hole. Plus a stint in one of those murder-refrigerators, and you’ll be good as new.’ He’d started rambling, but he didn’t like how Keith sounded. Like it was curtains. Like he’d accepted it. ‘Where’s the Keith-pigheadedness when you need it? Where’s the fun in this for me?’

 _Alright_. Lance was done. He’d throw himself into a sun for Keith Kogane to be healed miraculously like an actual blessing. It didn’t matter that he was setting himself up for a (apparently very imminent) hell of fall.

Lance loved him. 

 

 

He looked down at the figure he was cradling (that's right, cradling, and he was damn proud to admit it) in his arms. 

'So...' He cleared his throat, and Keith's weary bloodshot eyes flickered open. 'How'd you like your holiday?'

Keith coughed, and rasped. 'Too… many… tourists…’

Lance’s eyes may have started watering slightly, probably from the lack of sleep.

‘Maybe you could try to be a little bit taller next time.’ He forced a grin, half to stave off the wretchedness sitting under his ribcage.

Keith huffed a breath with a weak smile. ‘ ‘nd… wind up… like… your wee…dy ass?’

Keith wasn’t entirely sure where all this sass was coming from, but he figured it was a natural response to being around Lance. Lance always brought out the best of the worst in him.

Consciousness was still a vague fog. He knew he was out of the damn vent, but he wasn’t sure how… or if this wasn’t another hallucination… or possibly death.

It hurt to move. And think. His head probably hurt the worst, numbing everything else into a background current of pain. He was still feverishly hot, but that could mean he’d finally landed in hell, and surprise, surprise, Lance was a resident. Add to that the fact that he was unbearably close - so close that Keith’s addled brain thinks he might actually be on top of Lance - and it was definitely some kind of punishment from an unforgiving universe. He could barely move, making the burning, stifling pain all the more difficult to tolerate or ignore.

Thankfully there’s one source of distraction nearby he could always trust to snatch his attention.

‘How…s’your… tan…?’ Keith prods breathlessly, relying on Lance’s defensiveness to provide the right answer. ’Took a… sun… bathing… break?’

‘Better than yours, pasty face.’ Lance retorts immediately. ‘And I soaked up the rays _while_ chasing after you. Because _I_ can multitask.’

Keith tried to scoff but it came out like choking, and the next thing he knew Lance was holding his cheek in one hand, and… _shit_.

He wanted to check if Lance was okay (he couldn’t see too clearly because of the brightness burned onto his retinas and the heat that was making sweat drip into his eyes whenever they were open), and ask him what had happened, and prove that it was really him, but he knew he wouldn’t be able to understand or trust the answers he got. He’d already forgotten parts of their present conversation… he thought.

It was okay though. Because Lance was okay. Because Lance was here, and if Keith had to go, at least he knew Lance would… Lance would give a damn.

‘B- blue…’ He tried the epithet because Lance was actually really hard to say when you couldn’t focus or form whole words. He could manage “lan” or “seh” but not both in a single effort. Lance’s thumb brushed over his cheekbone in answer. ‘Don’t…’

’S’okay. I’m here. We’ve… I’ve got you.’

There was a gradual climb in the intensity of his headache. Keith tried to catch Lance’s wrist, but he could barely make his fingers work.

’S- s- sorry…’ _For crashing us into the desert. For leaving you behind. For making you the one who has to be here for this, even though you hate my guts._ ‘Plea… se…st- stay…’

‘Always.’ Lance’s other hand curled around Keith’s useless fingers. ‘I knew you missed me.’


	9. #sorry...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry...

The quadrant was so empty, for a long time Lance felt like they weren’t moving at all. Just… lingering, in a vast dark void. He could feel Keith slipping away as every minute passed. He’d asked for some water, and gulped a few mouthfuls before puking it down Lance’s leg, then he’d gone quiet and must have passed out again. Lance kept him on his side, one arm round his chest and a hand on his neck to make sure he was breathing.

There was misery sitting in the pit of Lance’s stomach. The heavy kind, the heavy thoughtful kind he tried to avoid, the kind that became increasingly difficult to ignore every time someone on the team got threatened or hurt.

There was emptiness outside the pod, an endless expanse of silence. And with Keith’s pulse fluttering under his fingertips, Lance knew he was stuck in that emptiness alone, frightened and helpless. On the verge of losing someone he’d only just admitted he cared about, and unable to do anything to stop it.

The console pinged for an indeterminate reason, and Lance pretended not to hear it. He pretended he wasn’t crying. He pretended he was at home, watching vintage Star Trek on the couch with Keith sleeping peacefully ( _safely_ ) in his arms.

The pinging intensified, but before Lance could properly stir himself to action, the pod jolted and he clutched Keith closer. _Quiznak_. Let that not be another tractor beam, or descent into orbit, or the depletion of fuel, or engine failure… let that be - _for once_ , in this nightmare week, let that be something good.

 

The only way Lance could distinguish the darkness of space from the new, different kind of darkness, was the crunching, rolling impact of the sides of the pod on metal as something bigger latched onto it.

He wished he could wipe his face, and at least muster some kind of bravado, but it was hard enough trying to let go of Keith. He didn’t want to walk away. He didn’t want to leave him alone for even a tic, just in case…

He activated the blue bayard and crouched behind the pilot’s seat, pivoting to try and get every part of the pod in his sights. The gravity was starting to shift, trying to compensate for the pull of whatever had hold of them. Lance lost his balance and grabbed the chair to stay upright. Keith slumped onto his back but didn’t wake, and a fresh batch of hot tears worked their way down Lance’s cheeks. He was so _tired_.

Another sweeping gravity change knocked him onto his ass, but his helmet comms started crackling and distracted him from the pain.

‘Lance? Keith? Come in- Come in, dammit!’

‘Guys? Can you hear us? Guys? Are you in there?’

‘Please respond. If you can hear us, please respond.’

‘Hunk would you not talk over me- Shiro! I’m trying to- Hunk!’

Lance had to take a steadying breath before he could muster an answer.

‘Pidge? I need help-’

‘Lance!’ Hunk interjected loudly, overcut with Shiro’s groan of relief.

‘I need-’

‘Lance? What happened?’

Desperation had his breath catching in his throat, ready to swear, but suddenly the comms went silent, and Pidge’s crisply efficient little voice reached him.

‘What do you need, Lance?’

‘I need help.’ Lance confessed wretchedly. ‘Is this- Is the Castle nearby?’

‘It’s coming. We came on ahead in the Lions- SHUT UP HUNK! Shiro can fly you STRAIGHT INTO THE HANGAR! and we’ll get you from there.’

‘God-’

‘Is it Keith? What’s wrong? I’M ASKING HIM SHUT UP!’

‘Yeah-’ Lance crawled back onto the chair and rolled Keith onto his side carefully, Pidge’s calm, methodical voice finally offering some respite from his wrenching anxiety. ‘He’s really bad, Pidge. It’s really bad.’

‘Okay, Lance. We’re nearly there. I’ll get Coran to set up a healing pod for him. Are you hurt?’

A vague idea of his aching muscles, bruises and scrapes from countless scuffles occurred to Lance, but he bit down a response angrily. He didn’t know how to stand up in front of the others and admit that he let Keith slip between his fingers in the desert, and that he took so long to track Keith down, and that it was his fault that Keith was… _dying_ , and that he would still think of himself.

‘Lance? Stay with me. The Castle is coming through the wormhole. Shiro’s gonna take you in. We’re all right here. Won’t be long.’

Lance slipped an arm under Keith’s neck and pulled him closer. His breathing had weakened to a shallow and disturbingly rare gasp, and he was generating so much heat it was making Lance sweat. He mumbled ‘Red…’ into the damp skin under Keith’s jaw. ‘Please…’

The Castle was looming ahead through the reinforced pod window, but Lance wasn’t really aware of its proximity until the gravity reasserted itself violently in a different direction and he nearly flipped over the edge of the chair. It was only his grip securing Keith to the seat which stopped them both from flying off as the pod tipped to one side and came toppling back upright again.

Lance stood up unsteadily, trying to ignore the spiky adrenaline tremble in his arms and legs, and lifted Keith as gently as he could manage. The pod door seemed like it was miles away, and he was still staggering towards it when it shhhhh-thudded open to reveal the ragged looking Black Paladin, without his helmet and frantically searching them out in the darkness.

‘Lance!?’ He took a step inside, but Lance sped up to meet him, stumbling slightly. ‘Keith! Is he-’

Lance mumbled an assent as Shiro’s arms curved under his own. ’Take him-’

‘What happen- Are you-?’

‘Take him!’ Lance wheezed harshly. He could feel the distress radiating from Shiro, mirroring his own fear. He hated having Keith lifted out of his arms like it was nothing, like he was being taken away for good. He hated the separation, the loss of that sickly feverish heat he could feel through layers of armour and thermal insulation. ‘Go!’

He tried to follow Shiro but he’d barely made it to the ground in the hangar before the adrenaline was gone and he felt the remnants of his energy dissipate all-too-suddenly, like dragon breath into chilled air. Shiro’s back was increasingly indistinct, and started to waver with distance and the blurriness of Lance’s vision.

Something yanked at his helmet and it popped out of place. Fresh, warm air struck his wet cheeks and bruised skin.

‘Lance, thank god!’ Hunk was holding him up, holding him close. ‘We were so worried. So worried. Where were you? Are you okay? You’re safe now.’

Hunk was hugging him and rubbing his back in comforting circles and Lance broke completely, burying his face in Hunk’s warm, reassuringly solid shoulder.

‘I tried… to get to him in time…’

Hunk’s arms curved around his shoulders and he slowed his speech soothingly. ‘I know, man. We all know. He knows.’

Lance cried harder. What if he didn’t? What if he didn’t make it and the last thing he was aware of was that Lance was too late?

Hunk kept holding on to him until the sobbing subsided, murmuring reassurances and patting his back.

‘He’s going to be okay.’

A small hand grabbed his loose fingers and pulled, and Lance murmured confused appreciation, recognising Pidge’s presence and her help.

‘Hunk’s right.’ Pidge agreed softly. ‘He’s going to be okay.’

‘You need some medical attention as well, Lance.’

 _Allura_. Oh, _quiznak_ , he hadn’t even thought of how disappointed in him Allura would be after this.

Her gaze was gentle when Lance finally extracted himself from Hunk’s embrace. Pidge had gone on ahead, and Allura was inspecting him with every look.

‘You need food and rest immediately.’ She instructed. ‘Coran will check you for injuries as soon as possible, but for now, you’ll have to make do with me, I’m afraid.’

‘Keith-’ Lance managed to protest, conscious of the way her eyes widened fractionally before she controlled her expression. _God_. She’d seen him… was he-? could he be-? Why had Lance ever let him out of his sight?

 

He was guided down the corridors in a blank haze. Something was wrapped around him, there was always someone, either Allura or Pidge or Hunk, standing at his side, leading him. He was sure it wasn’t far, but then they were in his room, and Allura kept repeating ‘sleep-deprived, exhausted, sleep-deprivation, fatigue’ and Hunk was pulling more pieces of his armour off and coaxing him to lie down.

He didn’t want to lie down. He felt like there were bees in his head and they were buzzing a single name, a single tune. He had to get back to Keith.

Hunk may or may not have been sitting on him or holding him down, but Lance realised pretty quickly that he couldn’t move, and then it stopped being a problem.

 

 

 

_Bees didn’t buzz names. Or hum tunes. Lance was almost certain of that. He wasn’t sure where he’d gotten the idea that a buzz was anything other than a buzz. Also, that there were any bees in the Castle. He hoped there weren’t, because he didn’t want to encounter rogue space bees at any point… well, ever. And he thought Hunk might actually have been allergic to bees… so maybe he was allergic to space bees too?_

_Although it might be nice to have some fresh honey, he wasn’t sure he could trust space bee honey. It could have strange effects, like tasting gross or being spicy. But it could have cool effects, like turning him into the space-bee version of Spiderman. SpaceBeeman. Speeman. Hm. But then he’d probably have to use honey as a weapon and that would be kind of weird, and potentially gross, and not necessarily even that helpful._

_So, on the whole, he wasn’t an avid supporter of the space bee experience… But, it paid to keep an open mind about some things._

 

 

 

Lance woke up when someone touched his cheek. He was too groggy to flail around much, but he still managed to startle Shiro, who was leaning over him in a frankly unnerving manner.

‘Ugh.’

‘Sorry for waking you.’

’Mmh. Nnh.’ Lance rubbed his face wearily, feeling the rough scrape of fresh bandages on his chin and lips. ‘Whaddya need, Sh’ro?’

‘How do you feel?’

’Tir’d.’ Lance admitted ineloquently, moving his jaw from side to side and swallowing. He felt… exhausted, actually. And sticky gross and heavy like someone had encased him in carbonite. He couldn’t really remember much about yesterday, either, which was probably because _someone_ hadn’t let him wake up properly.

‘Are you in any pain?’ Shiro continued, voice soft and concerned. Lance wondered if he’d gotten a concussion again. Probably from trying to do flying kicks on the training deck.

‘Mm. Not really.’ Lance opened his eyes wider and peered at Shiro. Why the sudden-

The obvious worry in Shiro’s gaze was enough to trigger an angst-laden memory of the same face, tortured with fear and horror when he’d lifted Keith out of Lance’s arms…

Lance sat up so fast the room spun. ‘Keith-’

Shiro placed a flesh hand on his shoulder, and when it didn’t stop Lance from kicking back the blankets he added the metal arm and pinned him down.

‘Stay calm, Lance.’

‘Stay-!’ Lance snorted. ‘I need to see him. I need to- I want to see him right now.’

‘He’s okay, but-’

‘Then let me see him.’

 

 

 

Lance stood as close as he was physically able to the pod and stared.

‘How long’s he been in there?’

‘Six hours.’ Coran reported nervously.

Lance kept staring. The Red Paladin was still in his bodysuit, still ribboned with rust coloured dried blood, still unnaturally pale. But the slits of wounds on his face and neck were still scarlet and fresh, and Lance didn’t understand how that was _possible._

‘How long did it take for me to heal from the explosion?’

‘Almost twenty-four hours.’ Coran added. Lance heard Shiro shift on his feet, and his chest tightened instinctively.

‘So he’s only got, what, eighteen hours left?’

There was silence.

Lance glanced around, noticing Coran’s intense focus on the panel at the centre of the room, Pidge tapping at her keyboard like she couldn’t hear him at all, and Shiro watching his metallic fingers curl and uncurl into a fist, over and over and over and over again.

‘Why isn’t he healing?’ Lance pushed, hearing his own voice crack painfully over the last syllable.

Coran hesitated.

‘Keith has… ah… he’s suffered a lot of damage at the cellular level. He had a serious fever, and some infections his immune system was not prepared to combat.’ He stepped around the panel cautiously and approached the pod, halting when he stood alongside Lance. ‘Additionally, the quantity of toxins he inhaled would have killed any average human. In fact, it was purely his Galra heritage which prevented the acute mercury poisoning from causing total systems failure until-’

Shiro cleared his throat, making Coran jump and Lance flinch.

Distantly, Lance heard Pidge stand up and leave the room.

‘So it’s gonna take longer…’ He continued weakly, fixing his gaze on the sharpness of Keith’s cheekbone behind the glass. He thought, abruptly, of Snow White in her coffin, and tried not to cry. Lips as red as blood, and all that crap. ‘But it’s gonna work… right?’

More silence. Lance hated silence. He hated it more now than he’d ever hated anything.

‘It’ll work.’ Shiro said grimly, cutting through the stillness with a voice like he was about to fight Zarkon hand-to-hand.

‘Because there’s no reason why it wouldn’t.’ Lance said quietly, listening to Shiro’s fingers curl and uncurl once again. He lifted his own hand and touched the pod carefully, spreading his fingers out like he could get some residual feeling of Keith through the metal and glass. He thought about Keith’s last few cogent moments. He’d been… scared. And Lance shouldn’t have left him.

He kept thinking, back through the past week, the past year, the previous years together at the Garrison, when Keith probably didn’t even know he existed. He stared at the sweep of Keith’s uneven eyelashes against his bruised cheeks.

‘What happened?’ Lance barely recognised his own voice. ‘What _happened_?’

Coran coughed to cover up a different noise, and Lance started to cry. He could feel tears dripping down his skin, but his voice was the same hard unfamiliar tone.

‘Was he still alive when you put him in?’

 

 

 

'No.’

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry...


	10. Anybody figured out what science is yet?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm so sorry to everyone who suffered, and extremely grateful for everyone who read. You are all much beloved.

Shiro refused to accept the possibility that the healing pod wouldn’t revive Keith.

Coran stuck resolutely with his theory that the intensity of the cellular regeneration required was what was delaying the healing of his surface wounds, not the fact that they’d potentially just snap-frozen a body.

Hunk seemed unable to acknowledge that Keith wasn’t just… walking around, and made reference to him regularly as if he was actively involved in conversations.

Allura became deeply involved in backtracking their movements across the galaxies, planning a mission of either revenge or liberation to the slavers’ planet.

Pidge ghosted around the Castle without staying in one place for too long, throwing out broadcasts and tracing activity in each quadrant with renewed determination to find her father and brother, and generally avoiding potential distractions.

 

Lance couldn’t bring himself to leave the pod room. His only compromise was a couple of visits to Blue a day, the psychic link a soothing balm for the agonising uncertainty and the fears crowding every waking moment. He ate and slept and waited in front of Keith’s healing pod.

He didn’t share Shiro’s certainty that they’d get Keith back, but that didn’t make him any less desperate for it to happen. Over the first night Lance checked the pod twice every hour, trying to tell if the wounds were closing, but by the time Hunk brought him breakfast the next morning the lack of change had left him lethargically miserable. The hourly checks dwindled to a check every few hours, to a check whenever Lance’s feeling of longing was overwhelming.

Shiro would come in often, linger for a while, grow restless and agitated and disappear again. Lance suspected he blamed himself, but knew it was irrational. Shiro had sprinted from the hangar to the healing pods and there was no way he and Coran could have gotten Keith inside any faster.

Lance, on the other hand…

 

 

 

It had been four days and nobody had mentioned the prevailing problem of when to draw a line under this.

Lance couldn’t sleep for more than a couple of hours at a time, interspersed with stretches of haunted wakefulness or hazy distress. Coran tried to coax him into a pod, and Hunk and Allura encouraged him to try sleeping in his own room for at least a night, but Lance refused.

Shiro didn’t push him, afflicted with the same troubled sleeplessness.

They shared the barely conscious fear that any long bout of rest could have horrible news waiting at the end of it.

Lance was starting to struggle with eating, or, in fact, mustering the energy to move, which was why he barely stirred when Shiro sat down next to his nest of blankets that evening.

‘You haven’t touched your… er, food… stuff.’ Shiro sounded too weary to be stern.

‘I’m good…’ Lance answered slowly. ‘I… had some before.’

‘Hunk’s been busy.’ Shiro agreed, without a trace of the enthusiasm he must have intended.

There was a pause, Shiro swallowed, and Lance sat up, using his arm for support.

‘Allura’s been giving me the details of what happened.’ Shiro continued, words laced with remorse. ‘What you did was-’

 _Not enough_.

‘- dedicated. I’m… I’m so proud of you.’

Lance let his eyes close. Shiro wrapped an arm round his shoulders.

‘I’m… grateful, Lance. I know you two don’t always get along, but… Keith is… like family.’

It had been four days. Lance couldn’t cry any more, even if he felt like it. He dropped his cheek onto Shiro’s fingers and avoided his eyes.

‘I didn’t-’

‘Lance.’ Shiro pulled him closer, hesitated, then exhaled a deep breath. ‘I don’t think I… I won’t be able to do this without him. I can’t… lose him.’

Lance couldn’t answer. He just… nodded.

Losing one of the team (a gauntlet they’d very nearly run when Shiro had vanished) was something they just wouldn’t be able to recover from. As it was it was incredible they were able to hold everything together. Half of Pidge’s family were still MIA. She, Hunk and Lance had basically been abducted from the Garrison by an alien warship without even a minimal explanation to their families (what was left of them). Keith was part-Galra for _chrissakes_. Believing that four teenagers, Shiro and two 10,000 year old Alteans could literally save the universe required some extensive suspension of disbelief (and practicality), something Lance was spectacularly good at.

But losing someone…

Losing _Keith_ …

It would destroy him, at the very least. Shiro too. Pidge was only fifteen, and fighting to retain faith that her family was still alive. It could shatter her. Hunk was too empathetic to walk away from anyone’s death without some serious damage. Allura and Coran felt responsible for them all, not to mention for keeping Voltron together and the entire universe safe.

 

 

 

Shiro left, and Lance curled back up in his nest, despair weighting his limbs into immobility.

The room was quiet except for the low, even sound of his own breathing, so he heard the door slide open again. He suspected it was Pidge because there was no immediate greeting, but didn’t straighten up to check. Pidge would poke him if she wanted to, if not, she’d stay a while and then move on. She’d been checking the Altean tech fairly routinely over the past few days, apparently unconvinced that it was working properly since they hadn’t seen any improvement in Keith’s condition.

He figured that was what she was doing now.

He sat up and murmured ‘Hey-’ trailing into shocked silence when he saw the white knuckled hand clasping the edge of the pod.

A bare foot toed the cold floor, searching blindly for balance, and the rest of him followed.

It was sheer adrenaline which propelled Lance across the room fast enough to catch Keith as he stumbled. Fingers wrapped around his bicep and shoulder, renewed to their previous bruising strength, but Lance was too stunned to care. Keith didn’t fall as gracefully as Allura. He just sort of… slumped, confused by the movement of his own limbs and using Lance to try and prop himself up.

‘Keith… Keith!’ Lance had one arm around his waist and the other under his arm before he’d even thought about it. ‘ _Red_ , thank god, _thank god_.’

He looked like a zombie, suit shredded and bloody, face and hair a mess, and he stank, but when Lance tipped his chin back the actual wounds were completely healed.

Keith blinked and opened his mouth, but seemed too disoriented to actually respond.

The intensity of the joy flooding Lance’s system was breathtaking. He’d practically given up… and Keith was… _here_. He dragged Keith closer, skimming hands over his jaw and his neck and his shoulders. His skin was chilled, a startling contrast to the heat Lance remembered from his fever, and he was breathing pretty heavily, eyes flickering up to meet Lance’s gaze.

He half-smiled, and Lance’s heart ached. He pulled him into a crushing hug and pressed his mouth against Keith’s temple, ignoring the common sense part of his brain warning him that Keith would probably kill him for this when he got his bearings back.

Keith mumbled something into his throat and he pulled back enough to give him some breathing room.

‘You okay?’ His voice was quiet and rough from lack of use, and Lance had to stop himself from squeezing tighter.

‘Dummy.’ He answered rudely, breathless and amazed that Keith hadn’t shoved him away yet. ‘I _lost_ you. I thought- I thought you were _gone_. You dick. Why would you- you scared me!’

That was when Keith pushed him, enough to dislodge his grip and put them face to face. He still looked unbalanced and slightly bewildered, but he only stared at Lance.

Lance stared back, absorbed by his dark grey eyes and gently puzzled expression.

He had to tell Shiro. Everyone. He needed to let go of Keith, stop clinging to him, but it was impossible. He was going to hold on until he was sure Keith was completely okay, healthy and… safe.

Keith looked down first, glancing dubiously at his outfit. ‘I… need a shower.’ He cautiously released his crushing grip on Lance’s shoulder and rubbed his face with a grimace.

‘Yeah.’ Lance observed freely. ‘You stink.’

Keith frowned but didn’t object. He spared a distracted glance around the room. ‘We back?’

Lance’s answer caught in his throat, a fresh wave of relief and elation crashing over him.

‘Yep…’ He hadn’t been able to loosen his grasp. He forced out a coherent sentence. ‘We… made it.’

Keith shot Lance a familiar look, like he couldn’t quite identify what his problem was, and Lance cleared his throat awkwardly.

‘Let me- I’ll get the others.’ He uncurled his fingers reluctantly, and tried to step back, but Keith stepped with him, still frowning.

‘I’ll come.’ Keith said intently, still holding Lance’s arm. ‘I’m hungry.’

Lance wrinkled his nose automatically. ‘Maybe you should wash before dinner.’

‘Maybe you should shut up.’ Keith responded immediately, more out of habit than malice. Lance pulled him towards the centre console and activated the Castle communications systems.

‘Kitchen. Now.’

He picked up one of the blankets from his nest and threw it over Keith’s head on the way out, evoking a scowl. He adjusted it to hang around his shoulders, which very definitely gave Lance a rush of satisfaction.

 

 

 

 

By the time they reached the kitchen Lance’s appetite had returned with a vengeance. Thankfully, Hunk had assumed his message was directly related to hunger, and had already filled a bowl.

‘You must be starving, why haven’t you been- oh hey Keith.’

‘Hi-’

‘Holy crap! Keith!’

Shiro was the first to come flying through the doorway. Lance was already a few mouthfuls into his meal, and he could feel Keith’s glare burning into the side of his face like he was ready to challenge him for the food, but honestly Lance was being careful, because the first thing that happened was Shiro colliding with Keith at full speed. Hunk was circling the kitchen, near-hysterically piling food onto a plate.

Shiro was mumbling nonsensical sentences, patting Keith down like he wasn’t sure if he was real or if he was hiding weapons. Keith was wincing and fidgeting but allowing it, clearly uncomfortable, muttering the occasional defence. He looked like he was struggling to discern the cause of everyone’s apparent insanity.

Coran materialised next, and started doing the crazed little movements he did when he got excited. He kept crowing “I knew it! I simply knew it would work!”

Pidge and Allura arrived at nearly the same time. Allura joined Shiro in showering Keith with affection (much to his obvious embarrassment) but Pidge exercised a very sensible degree of self-control after assessing the state of him.

It took everyone a while to calm down, and Lance had to slide onto the floor before they were finished, watching Keith’s suffering with glee. Fortunately for Keith, Hunk’s main approach to celebrating his health was to shove food at him, so he managed to eat while being harassed.

After food, Keith extracted himself to shower, insistent that he was fine to manage on his own. Coran tried to argue for a medical assessment, but Keith remained unconvinced.

Lance watched him go with embers of delight still burning in his stomach. _Keith_. They had him back, and he was okay. Same old Keith, all sarcasm and awkwardness. True, Lance had no idea exactly what he remembered, or what he’d been through, or if he’d noticed Lance’s… clinginess… but it didn’t matter. Keith was alive.

 

 

 

He wasn’t sure if he heard the knock or felt it coming first.

‘Come in.’

The door opened, and Keith didn’t lift his head from the knife in his hands. It had been on the bed, clean to glowing. He thought it must have been Coran who’d cleaned it, but nobody had mentioned it.

‘I thought I’d clean it while you were in the revitalisation shower.’ Lance joked awkwardly, hovering in the doorway. Keith looked up, fingers tightening on the knife hilt.

‘I thought you were Shiro.’ He muttered.

‘Oh.’ Lance patted his hair anxiously. ‘I’ve got a long way to go there, haven’t I?’ Keith stared at him blankly, still trying to process the information that Lance had cleaned his knife.

Lance coughed and came inside, closing the door. Keith didn’t look any more miserable than usual, which was somewhat comforting, if uninspiring. He looked… clean. Hair still damp from the shower, civilian clothes on. Completely free of blood and bruises.

There was a moment of silence. Keith set the knife aside, wondering why he felt so relieved.

Lance knew Keith had been through the circus already. How are you? How do you feel? Are you okay? What happened? He hadn’t really given a proper answer to any of them. It didn’t mean Lance didn’t want to ask.

‘It’s funny how you’re still tired when you come out.’ He chose to ramble instead, sticking his hands in his pockets. ‘Tired and hungry. Like, the healing pod doesn’t account for that?’

Keith frowned at his lap, confused either by the concept or why Lance was talking about it.

‘Keith…’

He lifted his head and made eye contact. He didn’t look like a Paladin, Lance thought absently. He looked like a seventeen-year-old. Lance had always been annoyed by how easily Keith had adjusted to life in space… like Zarkon had become his mission the second he’d heard the name. And even before that, he’d been chasing Voltron in the desert. Chasing Blue. Now he looked like anyone would expect, like a kid stuck in space. Like how Lance felt.

Keith stood up suddenly, crossing his arms. Lance was being uncharacteristically thoughtful, and it was worrying him.

Lance saw his opportunity and snatched it, edging forward and wrapping his arms around Keith’s shoulders. Surely he was allowed a second hug, after three days of pursuing this maniac across space, after four days of thinking he was probably dead.

Keith clearly didn’t feel the same way. He lifted both hands in a vaguely defensive way, and they stayed, hovering, in the air either side of Lance’s head.

Lance chose to pull Keith as close as possible and ignore that.

‘I’m sorry.’ He crushed his forehead into Keith’s shoulder. ‘I should have been with you.’

Keith twitched. He was starting to sweat nervously, and he wanted to push Lance off before it became sweltering. He lowered his arms and squeezed slightly, trying to demonstrate that the whole apology thing was unnecessary.

‘You… were.’ He mumbled reassuringly, administering a few awkward pats to Lance’s back.

Lance hesitated, torn between squeezing the life out of Keith and pulling back to shoot him a concerned look. Concussion? Still? Post-coma amnesia? Oh, that would explain the question dodging… although really, he’d already been happy to put that down to Keith’s personality. Keith responded to the hesitation by lifting his arms again. Lance let him draw back, but didn’t let go. They exchanged slightly bemused looks, until Keith broke eye contact.

‘I had hallucinations. Probably from the... fever.’

‘Or the blood loss.’ Lance raised his eyebrows. ‘Or the mercury poisoning. Or the starvation.’

Keith laughed, the kind of exhausted giggle you get when everything has gone to hell and giggling is all you can do.

'What did you hallucinate?'

‘It was just… you... being an ass.’ He shrugged and tried to pull back further. Lance’s face fell into an offended grimace.

‘First of all… Rude. Secondly, weird choice. And finally… What?’

Keith detached himself from Lance’s grip roughly, reconsidering the choice to admit that to him. Hallucination Lance had said some things Real Lance definitely didn’t need to know about. Ever. He turned away.

‘Don’t be weird.’ Lance groaned. ‘I’m- I’m just trying to say I’m glad you’re okay.’

He watched the reluctant quirk of Keith’s lips in response. ‘Thanks for… saving my life.’

‘Hah!’ Lance pointed so violently Keith nearly ( _nearly_ ) flinched. ‘I totally saved your life.’

Keith almost smiled. ‘You’re a dick.’

‘Hah.’ Lance repeated, and latched onto him again. Keith was still not very pliant, but in relative terms he was practically cuddly.

 

 

 

Keith had settled onto his bed, leaned up against the wall. He wasn’t overly keen on sleeping in the bunk, but then, he wasn’t overly keen on going to sleep at all. Lance was sitting on the floor, using his jacket as a makeshift (and ineffective) pillow. He didn’t seem particularly eager to go anywhere.

’So the tube really fixed you all up?’ Lance was saying. He was eating some kind toffee goop he’d had in wrappers in his pocket. Keith had turned down the offer. He still felt slightly strange from the meal earlier. It was like his body had forgotten how to digest food. ‘Warts and all?’

Keith nodded, ignoring the dull ache that settled behind his ribcage.

‘Could have done something for your personality.’ Lance added as an afterthought, attracting a glare. Keith relaxed his face to a frown after a moment, and fidgeted. Lance threw the candy wrapper at him, but it floated away unhelpfully.

‘What’s up?’ He knew that feeling. At least, he thought he did. It was difficult to tell because Keith always seemed to be in the midst of a brooding session.

‘It feels weird. Not having… the…’ Keith gestured vaguely. ‘It feels... Wrong.’ Something about passing out when you’re dying and waking up with no evidence of it left a bitter taste.

Lance nodded slightly.

‘If I'd had... I don't know.’

Keith felt himself closing off. He wanted to tell Lance the truth, but he couldn't risk exposing himself to the judgement.

Lance shrugged. ‘More time? Yeah. I think I know what you mean.’ 

The explosion. Christ, how could Keith forget? Lance continued, apparently unperturbed by Keith’s insensitivity.

‘It's like all the damage is gone so you're kind of supposed to be over it straight away. Like, no harm no foul, kind of thing... But... Yeah. It still happened.’

He moved over, sitting against the side of the bunk so they weren’t staring at each other.

‘I still have dreams about it. Not as much anymore, but occasionally. Like my brain needed time to get over it that my body didn’t.’

Keith watched him nervously, guilt bubbling in his stomach. He'd never really thought about it. Lance had just gone on as usual after he'd come out of the pod, and they'd had other problems to deal with pretty much immediately.

‘I don't want to dream about it.’ He admitted slowly. It wasn't necessarily... Okay, so it wasn't _just_ fear. It was fear combined with guilt and pain, and the feeling of his hope ebbing away, a sort of consuming despair.

Lance swallowed. He could feel Keith's eyes on him, and he thought he wasn't misreading the Red Paladin's anxiety. 'I'll wake you up.'

There was silence, in response. After a pause Lance reflexively tried to dispel his own discomfort.

‘So I’m your go-to daydream, is that it?’ He turned to face Keith and waggled his eyebrows, narrowly avoiding getting kicked in the face.

‘Gave me something to crawl away from.’ Keith retorted, but there wasn’t any aggression in it. Lance grinned.

‘Oh, hey, no judgement. I’m hard to resist, no sense pretending otherwise.’

‘And how are you justifying a one-man crusade across the universe, McClain? I never realised I was so dear to your heart.’

The casual tone startled Lance into a moment of speechless gaping. He cleared his throat. ‘I’m a badass, Kogane. It’s just more obvious without you around stealing my thunder constantly.’

Keith chuckled, and Lance tried to negotiate the rising breathlessness in his chest.

‘What did I say?’

‘Huh?’ Keith fidgeted again, pushing his back against the wall. Lance knew he was being intentionally unforthcoming, but once again, that was just Keith.

‘What did your hallucination of me say?’

Lance was pushing. Keith couldn’t tell if he was just being nosy, or if he actually had suspicions. Either way…

‘It wasn’t you.’ Keith interjected sharply. ‘It was me. My… head… I mean.’

‘What did _your_ me say?’ Lance clambered onto the bed a little too eagerly, and Keith responded by shuffling across rapidly to put some room between them. ‘Moral support? Knock-knock jokes?’ He winked. ‘Sweet nothings?’

Keith felt his eyebrows climb against his own will, and struggled to stop his mouth opening and closing like a fish. ‘I’d be saying them to myself.’

‘Hm.’ Lance insinuated himself closer on the bed, fully committed to making Keith as uncomfortable as necessary to get the truth out of him. Also, being as close as possible to Keith held a very strong appeal right now, at least until there was abundant evidence that he was alright, that he wasn’t going to disappear. ‘You always were a bit of a narcissist-’

Keith snorted so loudly it made Lance jump.

‘ _I’m_ a narcissist? _I’m_ a- You’re unbelievable.’

‘Thank you.’ Lance preened. ‘The first step is admitting-’ Keith took a swing at him, rejoicing in the freedom of full arm movement as his fist connected with Lance’s collarbone loudly. ‘Aggghhh.’

He laughed automatically at Lance’s flailing, and then wished he hadn’t. It seemed pretty inappropriate after the week they’d had.

He didn’t expect Lance to bounce back as fast as he did, flinging his momentum over with a surprising lack of restraint. He caught Keith with his weight and they both fell over, wrestling for the upper hand. Keith was laughing in astonishment, Lance was yelping something about a lack of gratefulness.

He loved the sound of Keith’s laughter. Being close enough to feel his disconcerting strength, the lean sinew of his muscles, it was intoxicating, even though Lance knew he should pull back.

Lance got one of his wrists pinned and they fought single-armed briefly.

‘Think you’re… oof…’ He wheezed. ‘… out of… practice…’

Keith grinned wolfishly, catching one of Lance’s legs with his own and flipping him over. ‘Think… you’re… mistaken.’

Lance wasn’t sure he’d ever met anyone who actually enjoyed combat as much as Keith did. It was kind of… ridiculously… _hot_.

 

 

 

Keith couldn’t tell if Lance was trying to get the truth out of him or just trying to distract him, but honestly, he was grateful. He would have been fine processing this on his own, like countless other things, but Lance’s presence meant he didn’t have to start straight away. And after a close (nobody had really explained just how close) encounter with an excessively lonely death, Keith was more willing than usual to tolerate some lighthearted scuffling. And Lance was warm and cheerful and full of banter.

He’d come after Keith. Even though… even though it would have been easier for him to get back to the Castle, back to Blue. Even though he didn’t know what he was walking into on his own. And he’d been waiting for him to get out of the pod. He had blankets and food in that room. He’d been _waiting_ …

Lance jabbed him in the ribs and Keith yelped involuntarily. He couldn’t tell if it was more ticklish or bruising, but he retaliated by trapping Lance’s wrist under his knee and pulling his hair just hard enough to make Lance squeak indignantly.

‘You-! You dick! Let go!’ He was struggling to breathe between giggling and complaining.

‘Don’t… play… with fire, Lance.’ Keith was still grinning, trying to trap the other wrist under his other knee as Lance frantically wriggled.

Lance snorted loudly, grabbing haplessly for Keith’s fringe. He was managing to hold Lance off, for the moment, but he was starting to tire.

Either way, he wasn’t going to yield.

Lance gave up first, insisting that he had a stitch. Keith was reluctant to believe him, and stayed poised and ready to strike.

‘Can’t believe you pulled my hair!’ Lance moaned with considerable anguish. ‘Where is the line, Keith?’

Keith didn’t bother to suppress his smirk. ‘It’ll grow back.’

Lance was still catching his breath, and damned if having Keith leaning over him, chest rising and falling heavily, wasn’t making his brain fail. He was flushed and still smiling, and when he smiled the warmth in his eyes was one of the prettiest things Lance had ever seen. He stayed quiet for a moment, letting tiredness act as an excuse for invading Keith’s bed.

He wasn’t sure what to do when Keith shifted, but when he lost his balance and tipped to the side, Lance caught him instinctively, hands against his ribs.

‘Lance-’ The word slipped out like a reflex.

Keith wasn’t sure he _knew_ what was happening… but he felt it. Lance’s breath hitching when he tried to move, and the way his gaze was fixing on his eyes, his mouth, throat…

And, _holy shit_ , was there heat flooding his stomach. It’s enough to (literally) knock him sideways, and suddenly Lance’s hands were warming his skin through the t-shirt, fingers splayed in the grooves between his ribs, palms brushing his abdomen, simultaneously reassuring and thrilling. Hypnotised, Keith dipped his head until his nose brushed Lance’s, and before he could even wonder if it was a mistake, Lance closed the gap, sliding a hand around to his back and pulling him down.

His lips were warm, soft, tangled with sensation Keith hadn’t expected. His chest dropped against Lance’s, and he marvelled at the pleasurable warmth of the length of their bodies pressed together. It was similar to the closeness of play-fighting, fueled by adrenaline and ferocity.

Keith felt fingers unfurl across his cheek and brush into his hair. His lower lip was tingling, sending sparks of senseless fervour across his nerves. Lance parted his lips, and any capacity for rational thought vanished forever. Another hand was winding its way around the back of his neck (kissing was _wonderful_ ) and he thought their legs were tangled together.

It never stopped surprising Lance how heavy Keith was. Heavy and warm, and as assertive in kissing as he was in fighting. Lance was pretending not to be aware of how inappropriate and unexpected this situation was. Keith was… potentially in shock. At the very least, he was as emotionally vulnerable as Keith ever was (which clearly wasn’t much).

But Keith Kogane was kissing him back, and that was a very difficult thing to be logical about.


	11. The curtain falls, on blissful night, anticlimactic? Exeunt stage right!

There weren’t any nightmares… although to be fair, there wasn’t that much sleep.

It seemed as though neither of them were willing to stop in order to get actual rest. Lance couldn’t stop thinking that Keith would come to his senses shortly, and probably karate chop him out of the bed, but he’d steal as much attention as he could get before that happened. 

Keith had a vague idea that he was hallucinating again, but it felt real, and that was good enough for him. Lance’s skin was gloriously soft, his hands were gentle, and he smelled _nice_ … like soap and citrus. Keith hadn’t noticed before how tanned Lance was, and how pale his own fingers were, gliding across Lance’s jaw and into his hair. Everything about Lance was so _lovely_ … Keith felt like a scrappy desert weasel in comparison.

Eventually Lance hummed and rolled onto his side, pulling Keith down next to him. but it didn’t prevent them from fidgeting and nudging one another, Lance trailing kisses down Keith’s jaw, neck, palms, and Keith blinking sleepily, mesmerised, and tracing patterns across Lance’s skin and hands and collarbones with his fingertips.

 

 

 

Keith must have drifted off first, some time in the early hours of the morning, and woke up so warm he thought he’d have to pour himself out of bed. It took him a moment to process the weight over his hip. Lance was clutching a handful of the back of his shirt and snuffling gently into his throat. He had a lot of fluffy hair, and it was trying very hard to make its way up Keith’s nose. He stilled, wondering if Lance was going to freak when he woke up.

This was… impulsive, even for Keith. And Lance could be so much more fragile than him, that maybe he’d needed this… closeness… without actually wanting it.

For pity’s sake, Lance didn’t even like him! Yes, he was obsessive, competitive, aggressive, whatever his motivation (which Keith still didn’t know), but this sudden surge of affection was extremely unexpected. Probably just down to exhaustion and irrationality.

As for Keith…

He managed to extricate himself from the bed without disturbing Lance too much. There was a bit of mumbling and Keith thought he’d wake up, but he gradually relinquished his grip and rolled onto his back serenely. Sleep was clearly the only time Lance kept his mouth shut, and he looked as peaceful as Keith had ever seen him.

Keith pulled his gloves on and grabbed his bayard. He’d hit the training deck before breakfast, leave Lance to decide whether he wanted to pretend this never happened. Wouldn’t be the first time.

He stopped off to visit Red again. He’d gone to her after his shower the previous evening, and the burst of fussy anger in his head had forced him to lie on the cockpit floor for half an hour before making any headway into calming her down. The joy of the psychic link was the lack of ambiguity involved. Keith never had to try and interpret things when the connection was so direct. If only it was the same with… people. Shiro was alright. Shiro was generally pretty straightforward with him, when it was important. He knew Keith didn’t like navigating the nuances of emotion. In fact, most of the team were pretty clear when it mattered.

Lance, in particular, made his feelings obvious. Or he had… up to a point. This point, now. Sure, Keith wasn’t really certain what caused Lance’s hatred (he might have theorised that it was sheer idiocy on occasion), and when it was aggression it didn’t really matter that much, but this was… different. If Lance was feeling… affectionate things… Keith really didn’t know how to explain that, especially since it was such a sudden break from the norm.

Lance could have been sick. Or an imposter. Or he might have acquired some kind of brain injury. It hadn’t escaped Keith’s notice that he still had bruises and cuts on his face and hands. He hadn’t gone into a pod, which meant potential internal damage might have gone unnoticed. It was unlikely, given that Coran was a stickler about these things… but it was possible. Abrupt changes in personality were indicative of _problems_. Keith knew that, at least.

He would give Lance a chance to react to the situation and he would observe it, see if there were other signs of unusual behaviour.

He ran the training program through the first few levels, finding that he was a little rusty. His muscle memory was still excellent, reflexes good, but he felt slower, had trouble engaging mentally. Probably just fatigue. He skipped breakfast and kept going until his muscles loosened up.

He wasn’t sure what he expected, but as the day wore on his confusion and aggravation only increased. He was hungry, but he felt too uncomfortable to eat. Tense.

He pushed harder in the simulations than usual, trying to elicit adrenaline and clarity, but it left him open to a couple of nasty countering attacks. One blow to his ribcage put him on the ground (and ruined what was left of his appetite), and another strike nearly took his head off. 

 

 

 

It wasn’t until after lunch that Lance came in. Keith registered his presence but didn’t react, focusing instead on the robot charging at him. He was crouching, sweat dripping into his eyes and a dull ache blooming from his temple after a lucky knock with the sword hilt. He lifted his bayard to cleave upwards, and a burst of translucent yellow energy disintegrated his opponent’s head.

He had to drop a hand to the floor to regain his balance, panting and sliding a glare across at Lance.

‘I was handling it.’ Keith snapped, usual antagonism returning out of habit.

‘Now you’re not.’ Lance responded brashly, letting the rifle swing by his hip.

Keith lapsed into silence, averting his glare to the floor. He sensed Lance was here to start something, but he no longer held the certainty that it was going to be a fight.

Lance came closer, swivelling the gun theatrically. ‘You been fasting, or something? Hunk’s going to have kittens. He thinks you’re making rude insinuations about his cooking.’ His tone was light, bordering on disinterested. Keith wondered if hurting Hunk’s feelings would have motivated Lance enough to track him down, or if there was something else on his mind.

‘I’m not hungry.’

’So… what are you?’ Lance deactivated his bayard and stuck his chin up defiantly. ‘Angry?’

Keith frowned, frustration dissipating into confusion. Lance thought he was angry… And… yeah, he was. But if Lance thought he was angry about what had happened last night, he was wrong. And Keith ought to tell him that. But then he’d have to explain what he did feel, and that was an terrible idea.

Keith stood up, pushed his hair back with a hand. Lance glanced at him and looked away.

‘I didn’t- I couldn’t… get out.’ Keith said stiffly. ‘I… should have…’

Lance stepped forward and hesitated. Keith raised his sword, inspecting the blade to stop his nervousness from being apparent.

‘I should have been able to get out.’ He finished forcibly, and whipped the blade through the air. Lance winced slightly, and clenched his jaw.

‘Don’t be stupid.’

Keith scowled and swung the sword again. ‘Forget it.’

Lance risked life and limb storming forward, and snatched Keith’s wrist to hold him still. ‘I will not.’

Keith tried to pull his arm away once and then gave up. Lance wasn’t sure how best to hammer home how crazy it was that Keith blamed himself. Perhaps it wasn’t surprising. He was dogmatically self-sufficient with nearly everything else, naturally it would be the same with this. Any idea of needing rescue inevitably offended his sensibilities.

Lance wasn’t sure whether to be irritated or sympathetic, so he led blindly with an uncontrolled mixture of both. ‘You’re being stupid. You couldn’t have gotten out. Nobody could have. And sealing yourself into the thunderdome without eating or sleeping is a dumbass idea. You can’t change what happened.’ He rolled his eyes on the last point, which only served to aggravate Keith. He was on the verge of telling Lance to piss off, when the Blue Paladin’s grip tightened. ‘I’m serious, you know? You can martyr yourself as much as you want… I can’t stop you. But it’s still stupid. And it doesn’t change what happened. You made it, and that’s the end of it.’

Keith scoffed. ‘Barely.’ He grit his teeth. ‘I was beaten by rats. Good effort by a Paladin of Voltron-’

Lance cut him off, grabbing Keith’s other wrist and trying to ignore the sharp sword hovering a few inches from his face. ‘You’re out of your mind! You’re… what? Embarrassed? You were injured and imprisoned at gunpoint, tied up and sold as a slave, poisoned and trapped and attacked and… _jesus_ …’

He let go of Keith and turned away, lifting his gaze to the ceiling like gravity could force tears back into his eyeballs. ‘I’m not- We’re not so stupid we can’t see what happened! “It’s the end of the world ‘cos you weren’t gonna get to go out in a blaze of glory.” I don’t… I can’t… Look, you can think whatever you want, but don’t put that on us! I know how bad it was, Red. Nobody’s hearing “rats” and thinking you didn’t quiznaking try hard enough!’

An increasingly familiar surge of… appreciation? poked at the periphery of Keith’s consciousness. Lance could be so… sweet. It didn’t change anything. It didn’t change how Keith felt. Death by rats would have been pathetic. It was humiliating enough that he hadn’t been able to escape his captors, but add to that the fact someone (even Lance) had to drag him back in such a miserable state… he wasn’t exactly sensing a lot of faith in his capacity to perform Voltron mission to defend the universe. Lance had even showed up to tell him to cool it on the training- he didn’t need _mothering! -_ he wasn’t a _child!_ He was supposed to be able to defend himself, control himself.

Right now, he was struggling with the paralysing desire to just drop the bayard and attack Lance’s mouth with his teeth. The more he tried not to think about it, the more the idea invaded his head, electrifying his nerves and keeping his muscles tense.

Lance had managed to stop being tearful, but he couldn’t bring himself to look Keith in the eye. Instead he chose to grumble irritably about Keith’s masochistic, melodramatic, childish tendencies, inciting a threatening stare and a few warning twitches of the sword. He hadn’t let go yet. He was hoping Keith would react in some way, tell him to leave and never come back, or, ideally, tell him that the previous night was perfect and he definitely wanted to do it again. However, he was starting to suspect Keith’s strategy was to ignore the whole problem until it went away, or at least, until Lance went away. Then he could go back to beating the crap out of simulations and being an emotionally stunted killing machine.

Dammit. He’d been worried about this as soon as he’d woken up alone. Kogane getting buyer’s remorse? Stuff of his nightmares. Then he hadn’t been at breakfast, or at lunch, and Shiro had calmly (with every ounce of self-control he apparently had) suggested that Keith *deep tortured breath* needed time to himself. Lance would have laughed if he wasn’t equally as desperate to get hold of Keith and shake him like a rag doll until he saw sense. They both knew any idiot who did that would meet the pointy end of something pretty quickly.

‘So…’ Lance cleared his throat. He had to get some idea of what Keith was thinking, even if he had no idea how to ask. ‘You never did tell me what your hallucination was about.’

Keith deactivated his bayard so suddenly Lance started, but he just slouched, shrinking as all the tension ebbed from his muscles.

He chewed a lip, staring at Lance’s elbow, and mumbled passively. ‘I’m real glad you’re okay too, y’know.’

_You’re a coward. Ask him! Ask him if he cares about you. Ask him why he hated you. Ask him if he still hates you._

‘Yeah.’ Lance said vaguely, before squinting at him. ‘You… you are?’

Keith lifted his eyes in a faintly quizzical (and faintly angry, because it was Keith) look. ‘Yes.’ He had to bite his tongue to keep from adding “asshole” and rolling his eyes again. Emoting was a bitch.

Lance cocked his head like an eager puppy, seeking more evidence of possible attraction. ‘You’re not pissed at me?

Keith blinked. ‘No, I- About what?’

‘You know…’ Lance gestured very randomly, watching Keith try and follow his motions as if they actually had meaning. There’s pink blossoming over his cheekbones, he can feel it. ’The other… stuff… that happened.’

‘No.’ Keith had to force himself to continue. ’It was… nice.’

Lance’s grin was like the sun rising over the ocean after a long, long night. ‘Yeah?’

His smile slipped when Keith’s unease didn’t subside.

‘I don’t… really… understand…’ Keith added slowly, every syllable demanding incredible effort. ‘I thought… you… y’know… _hated_ me.’

Lance visibly wilted, and scrambled to pour oil on _those_ troubled waters. ‘I don’t! I mean, I _didn’t_. I never did. I only… I was just being a dick because…’ He hesitated, torn between telling the truth and telling an obvious lie. He really, really wanted things to be good between him and Keith. He couldn’t go on indefinitely pretending that he didn’t like him at all, that chasing him across several galaxies and spending the night in his bed (oh lord, there was the blush again) were just impulsive inexplicable aberrations from his genuine feelings. Christ, Keith had almost… he _had_ died (man, that made Lance feel sick) and that had really brought home the fear that Lance’d never get an opportunity to even… tell him. How Lance felt. About him. And his stupid outdated hairstyle, stupid emo personality, brilliant piloting, sarcasm, strength, courage, intensity, his loyalty and his goddamn purple baby-bird eyes.

So maybe Keith wouldn’t win awards for his sensitivity… and maybe he’d been a complete jerk back in the Garrison… and maybe those were both good reasons for Lance to keep prolonging this conversation… but they didn’t make him want this any less.

‘… because you never even noticed me.’ Lance finished finally. A sour taste crept into his mouth at the admission. He felt painfully vulnerable, and Keith was, as noted, never particularly reliable at being supportive.

Keith lifted his chin and looked at something over Lance’s shoulder for a couple of seconds. ‘I upset you.’ He observed grimly.

Lance said quietly. ‘I don’t think you meant to.’

Keith scowled. ‘I probably did. I tried to piss most people off. Except Shiro.’

‘That might be why you got kicked out.’ Lance noted, smiling weakly.

Keith sneered. ‘Iverson.’

‘Hah. Yeah.’

A few moments passed in stilted silence.

‘I’m sorry.’ Keith said finally, and he said it with the kind of unambiguous certainty Lance had long-associated with him. It did help, if… marginally. ‘I wasn’t thinking about… I wasn’t thinking. I’m sorry.’

Lance looked much younger when his feelings were hurt. He was unusually quiet too… like a sedated version of himself. He was distractingly close, still. Distractingly emotional. Distractingly pretty. Like a statue dipped in dark honey.

 _Shit_. That was a weird thought.

Lance’s jawline was even more striking up this close. Keith knew it better now from spending half the night tracing his fingers across Lance’s features. He had remarkable angles, symmetry… a fineness to his mouth and eyes which Keith couldn’t stop admiring. Blue-green eyes like the sea. They were more green when he was upset… like they changed colour when he got misty-eyed.

At this moment Lance’s eyes were watching his movements with laser-focus.

‘So…’ Lance repeated carefully. ‘You don’t… hate me… either?’

Keith sniggered involuntarily ( _actually sniggered!_ ) and Lance blushed.

’No.’ He answered emphatically. ‘You did save my life.’

Lance tipped his head and opened his mouth nervously. ‘Ehhhhhhhh… About that…’

 

 

 

Keith was more than willing to continue the “conversation” in private, but Lance was insistent that he eat first… and, preferably, shower.

Keith wasn’t as concerned about his death as Lance had expected. In fact, he didn’t seem particularly inclined to count it at all. He seemed much more interested in the anxious guilt that accompanied Lance’s strained confession. He was fascinated by the idea that Lance had mourned for him. And that he’d, admittedly somewhat belatedly, decided that enough was enough.

It was a hell of a lot of work convincing him that Lance had been harbouring *cough, cough* feelings for him substantially longer than two days. His comprehension of his own feelings remained murky and unapproachable. He was at least happy to accept that Lance was really Lance, he just didn’t really seem certain of how Lance’s aggression towards him could have coexisted with longstanding feelings of admiration.

Two platefuls of miscellaneous substances and a thorough hot shower later, and Keith found Lance already draped across his bed, grinning.

‘You look like a drowned rat.’ He commented cheerfully.

Keith scowled and threw a towel at him. ‘You look like a sundried tomato.’ He muttered balefully.

Lance scoffed, but couldn’t stop smiling. Kogane really didn’t look like a drowned rat. He looked like one of those models in shampoo ads who had wet hair but full mascara and eyeliner make-up. Lance pictured him flipping his hair from side to side and nearly wet himself laughing.

‘What’s your problem?’ Keith asked warily, but he came close enough for Lance to be able to pull him onto the bed.

‘No problem.’ Lance smirked. ‘I only have a solution.’

Keith rolled his eyes, but didn’t protest when Lance nuzzled at his jaw.

‘How come this never came up in the psychic link?’ Keith wondered absently, drawing his thumbs across Lance’s cheekbones. ‘You’d think it’d be obvious.’

‘Mm.’ Lance kissed the corner of his mouth. ‘Pidge being a girl never came up. Or you thinking… finding out you’re part-Galra. I figured we just focused on whatever enormous monster was attacking us and tried not to trip ourselves up. Plus, I still do think you’re kind of an asshole.’

Keith snorted, and vied for a proper kiss. ‘Ditto.’

Lance tangled fingers in his hair - still warm from the shower - and mumbled a vague noise of derision.

‘D’you think it’ll come up now?’ Keith continued, when Lance paused briefly for breath. He didn’t sound concerned, more… curious.

Lance was half lying down, half leaned against the wall, and Keith was sitting on the edge of the bed, curved into him. Lance watched the languid blink of water droplets off his eyelashes and felt his stomach climb into his throat.

‘I guess it might…’ He tipped his head. ‘I guess… Would that be a problem?’

Keith shook his head in response, apparently unfazed. ‘Maybe. Maybe not. Unless worrying about you in battle destabilises Voltron.’

Lance blushed automatically, curling over as warmth flooded his chest. ‘You’d worry about me?’ He’d assumed Keith would refuse to acknowledge the burgeoning relationship, and would balk at the idea of the others finding out.

‘Yes.’ Keith said, with unshakeable certainty. ‘Before, too, but more now… I don’t think I’d be able to stop myself focusing on you.’

Lance grabbed him and pulled him down, ignoring the grunt of surprise and irritation. Keith fell across his lap, and wriggled about to get his legs on the bed as Lance kissed him.

Lance got an arm under his back and pulled him close, craving the heat radiating through his shirt. Keith clasped Lance’s neck with one hand and let the other hook under the hem of his shirt, scraping over the soft skin of Lance’s hip and evoking a hum of pleasure.

The angle wasn’t exceptional, and when Lance shifted to improve it he noticed Keith’s faint hesitation.

‘What’s up?’ _Oh god… don’t change your mind, don’t change your mind_.

Keith looked like he was going hold his tongue, but he knew the only way to make sure was to get everything out in the open as early as possible.

‘The… Galra thing… doesn’t bother you?’

It was Lance’s turn to shoot him a wide-eyed look of confusion. ‘Er… no.’ When had that ever…? When would that ever…? ’Nah, c’mon, you’d look cute with big cat-ears. We could call you the Purple Palad- Ooof!’

 

 

 

Lance slept in Keith’s quarters for nearly a week, before protesting that he had the housekeeping habits of a dung beetle and insisting that they use Lance’s room instead. It was a startlingly easy change - Keith typically slept like the dead (for Lance, it would never stop being *too soon* for that joke) and when he woke up he normally went to train first thing. He didn’t disturb Lance’s regime at all, although he did shoot some sceptical glances his way the first couple of nights he applied the face mask.

He liked how soft Lance’s skin was, though, so he felt it was self-defeating to criticise.

It was heat which marked Keith's nightmares. He turned into an absolute furnace when he was dreaming about the vents, and it invariably woke up Lance in minutes. He wasn't sure if it was a Galra thing or just a Keith thing, but it was kind of impressive. Keith didn't make noise, and he barely moved, so the only sign that his sleep was troubled was the sweat beading across his skin. 

Lance had initially encouraged him to stop using blankets and to sleep in his underwear because he thought the heat was giving him nightmares, but when it didn't stop him going thermonuclear Lance realised it was the other way around. Maybe his body reverted to trying to stave off the infection, maybe it was just adrenaline and fear. 

On very rare occasions Keith's breathing would turn fast and shallow and that always scared the hell out of Lance. Most of the time he'd just lie still and silent. Lance learned to hold his wrists and avoid his elbows when he woke him up, because with or without nightmares Keith was like a spring-loaded combat machine, and Lance had the bruises to prove it. 

Vocal and persistent complaints aside, it didn't bother Lance much. When the disorientation passed Keith would apologise and proceed to stare at the place he'd hit Lance with terrifying laser-focused intensity, like he thought he could heal it with his mind if he just concentrated hard enough. Lance would bitch, poke him, complain about his bad manners, poke him some more, and generally use it as an excuse to get into Keith's space. It took him a few minutes to cool down, shake off whatever dream he'd had, and Lance liked the attention he got. 

They had a ratio of about five Keith nightmares to one Lance nightmare for the first couple of weeks. Lance’s nightmares were a big ordeal. There was thrashing and mumbling and crying on the worst occasions… but it wasn’t always the explosion, to be fair. Sometimes it was the fear of just… being adrift in space. Alone. Sometimes he dreamt that Keith died, and when Keith woke him up Lance would cling to him.

Negotiating affection was kind of stilted, in the best way. Lance constantly wanted it and provided it, and Keith seemed absolutely fine without it until Lance got under his skin and wound him up. Then he was very… passionate. He never got tired of Lance, and that was the most reassuring thing. They both still bitched and insulted and were insensitive, but it was entirely insincere, like the thinnest layer of antagonism over an ocean’s worth of loyalty. Keith never pushed Lance away, and Lance never gave up getting in his space, and it worked.

It did make fighting more difficult, even if it never actively interfered with forming Voltron. Any battle came with the general fear of losing anyone, and the entrenched fear of losing one another again. If either of them ever took too long to so much as respond over comms there would be recriminations later, and in Lance’s case, often tears.

Lance wasn’t sure whether the others were even completely aware of what was going on, and Keith didn’t particularly care. It never really came up in the psychic link, not in any specific sense, and nobody seemed to behave any differently. Maybe Allura was more forgiving of Lance’s sense of humour (not really) and possibly Pidge and Hunk smirked at one another more (hadn’t they always done that?). Mainly it was just Shiro who seemed to recognise the difference, and he was just relieved that they were both okay and less likely to be unhealthily repressing their loneliness.

Difficulties arose, inevitably, but they made do. Lance would later remark that in the midst of the chaos of trying to defend an entire universe using a giant robot made out of space lions (or rather, lionesses, as Coran repeatedly pointed out), getting romantically involved with your arch-nemesis was comparatively trivial. It was actually a hell of a perk… but he wouldn’t let Keith know that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone who left kudos and comments, and tolerated my cruelty and weirdness (and occasional inappropriateness). Thank you especially to those who have been here from the start, even persisting through my *sob* unkindness.  
> Thank you to my penguin, who is my Coran (sort of, being not Altean, nor ginger, nor male, nor a space-kiwi). I have her to thank for a multitude of good ideas (babe... <3) and especially for pointing out that *they* *are* *lionesses* *not* *lions* *guys* *get* *it* *together*...  
> Also, I'm sorry I got you stuck in Voltron hell. Thank you for putting up with my angry yelling about space-magic and how precious Keith is on a near daily basis.  
> This is also the only story I have like, ever completed. And it is thanks to everyone who left kudos and comments and really I just really really really appreciate it so much.


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